KNOX'S GAME-BIRDS AND WILD-FOWL. * THIS book exhibits a great improvement

on its predecessor, Orni- thological Rambles in Sussex ; Mr. Knox having apparently gained confidence from success, and both art and facility from practice. There is much less of mere writing in the volume ; the matter is fuller, the style closer, and if there is not so much of personal narrative embodying incidents, its absence is compensated by the greater variety of subjects and their wider range. Instead of being limited to Sussex as in the Rambles, Mr. Knox travels through England, and into Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with an 000asional jump to foreign lands by means of correspondents.

His theme embraces whatever birds are pursued for sport by

real sportsmen, and whatever animal preys upon those birds, whe- ther winged, quadruped, or biped. Not only the partridge, the pheasant, the various kinds of grouse, and such lairds as teal, snipe, and woodcock, are the subjects of the sportsman-na- turalist, but the commoner water-fowl—as wild-ducks and geese in their varieties, with rarer birds—as the wild swan. The " foes " of these creatures are numerous enough ; the eagle, the fal- con, the hawk, the fox, and lesser vermin, with last and worst the

cher, both for eggs and birds, as well as those who encourage . The legitimate sportsman, his gamekeepers and beaters, be-

long, we imagine, to the class of what the titlepage ludicrously calls " friends " ; being friendly after the fashion of the ogre in the tale, who fattened his guests.

• The more important birds, whether game or the enemies of game, are handled in separate chapters, or as it were treatises,—as the partridge, the falcon, the pheasant, the capercaillie ; while the subordinate fowls of the air are mentioned incidentally in con- nexion with the greater ayes. This general method is diversified by narratives of personal adventures; the habits of birds being still a main feature in the experiences of the sportsman, while on most occasions the landscape forms a background or foreground to the picture.

The distinguishing characteristics of all that Mr. Knox -writes are earnestness and thorough knowledge. A man who has lived long in a place or shot over a district may be said to have a know- ledge of it ; and so he has, but of a superficial or outward kind. In all that regards a country or the birds that inhabit it, Mr. Knox goes au fond. He observes their habits and their actions ; he in- vestigates their appetites and propensities, so to speak, and forms his own conclusions, not from slight or hasty but slow and re- peated observations of nature. No opinion of a practical man, whether agriculturist or gamekeeper, has weight with him ; he in- Tures for himself as to the alleged mischief done by particular birds. or beasts, either to game or crops, and denounces the indis- orimmate slaughter with which many creatures are pursued by ignorant gamekeepers and landlords as ignorant, and raises his warning voice, in conjunction with other naturalist sportsmen, against the needless extinction of several species of ferze nature.

But as Mr. Knox has the faculty of drawing conclusions from various classes of things put together, as well as from things of one species, he sees further than a mere sportsman or than all naturalists ; and his perception as a logician combined with his zeal as a sportsman induces him to push his theories fur- ther than many will go with him. It is, as we all know, the result of cultivation to drive away, and even to extirpate va- rious kinds of creatures. Sometimes this takes place from obvious causes. The felling of woods, the draining of swamps, deprive the birds of shelter or of food : at other times it is not so obvious why they at once flee away from the advance of enclosures and the plough ; but recede they do, as the Bed Indian retires be- fore the first advances of settlement. All these causes are at work infitreat Britain, as well as the prejudices of man ; and Mr. Knox evidently feels that it would not be a bad thing if enclosures and

• Game-Birds and Wild-Fowl; their Friends and their Foes. By A. R. Knox, F.L.S., Author of "Ornithological Rambles in Sussex." Published by Van Voorst.

modern schemes of agricultural improvement could be stopped. It is true he cloaks this desire under a concern for the agrieultiuists themselves ; since much land, he says' cannot at the present prices pay for enclosing and cultivating, but is only a loss to the so-called improvers. It is, however, easy to see that ferie naturra are the main objects of his concern ; although he admits, and indeed elu- cidates in several remarkable and interesting passages, that partr ridges, and even pheasants with a little care, thrive best in a higk.. ly-cultivated country. The great destroyer of creatures not game, but of high intent to the sportsman—from the eagle to the kite or jay—from the genuine -wild cat to the marten or weasel—are the game-preservers ; mostly in ignorance, though Mr. Knox cannot help admitting that - some of his clients do make a meal off game in or out of season.: The true Thalaba, however, is the poacher • and Mr. Knox would, if he could, have more stringent 'ingent game-laws : as this cannot be, he calls upon country justices for a more stringent enforcement of the existing law, no matter for the odium. Worse, however, than the common poacher, who shoots his bird—or, may be, his man- ia the egg-stealer, the meanest and basest of his tribe. Wealthy citizens with a turn for ornithology and imitative battues encourage these fellows, by buying pheasants' eggs, which the eit hatches tin- der hens to ornament his place. Gourmands are still more mis- chievous, from the wider range which their palate takes. It strikes us, however, that your ornithologist is the most mischievous of all, from the rarer game he gals at. "Even in Orkney and Shetland, and the remote parts of Scotland, the value of the eggs of the golden and of the sea eagle are so well known to shepherds and keepers that there is every probability of these noble birds— especially the former, whose eyrie is generally on inland cliffs—being more effectually extirpated from this cause than from any other. Although a re- cent specimen of the king of the birds' would always prove a welcome ac- quisition to a museum, yet ignorance of the art of taxidermy in these dis- tant places, the difficulty of preserving the body untainted in the flesh until a moment of leisure, the probability of its being too much lacerated by a successful shot to admit of even a rude process being carried into effect, and the chance of its falling over the cliffs and being irretrievably lost ; all com- bine to render these worthies less anxious to destroy the birds themselves than to obtain their eggs, which are easily blown, are comparatively port- able, and have lately become in such request that they fetch, on the spot, from a pound to thirty shillings each ; indeed I have known a larger sum given for a very ambiguous-looking specimen in England, warranted from the golden eagle,' but which to an experienced eye had an unmistakeable look of having emanated from a Norfolk turkey-yard. "The peregrine falcon, the osprey, the kite, the black-throated diver, and many others come under the same category ; their eggs are sought after with the greatest avidity, and the price asked and frequently given for them would be almost incredible if it were not well authenticated.

"To a similar cause probably, as well as to its large size and the exposed situation of its nest, the bustard owes its now almost total extinction in Eng- land. In Norfolk, which was' or is its last stronghold, the egg has for many years been worth a guinea to him who was 'fortunate enough to find it. As a natural consequence of this state of things, a set of itinerant charlatans have for some time, and too frequently with success, driven a thriving busi- ness by selling counterfeit specimens of this and of almost every other valu- able species of egg. The deception is ,frequently so perfect as to take in many an honest dealer who heretofore flattered himself that he was up to' all the tricks of the trade,' and who would himself have scorned to foist them in retail upon his own customers. The great similarity which the eggs of many congenerous birds bear to each other, especially in the wading and swimming divisions, and at the same time the remarkable variety in the superficial markings which even those taken from the same nest frequently present, has suggested one simple and easy mode of deception. Thus, for example, an egg of the great black-backed gull (Laths marinus), diffenng

perhaps slightly in colour from the more usual type will be Glaucous Gull' in the travelling boxes of these crafty pedlars; that of the common tern, Gullbilled Tern,' or Roseate Tern ' ; a snipe's egg of unusual dimen- sions will figure as belonging to the Great, or Solitary Snipe,' while a dimi- nutive example of that of the landrail will be inscribed 'Spotted Crake,' or Baillon's Crake,' &c.

"But the art is carried to a still higher pitch of refinement. The exterior coat of many of the commoner eggs—among which those of the goose and turkey play a conspicuous part—is first removed by some chemical process. The new surface is then stained of an appropriate ground tint, and an elabo- rate and cunningly devised tracery, exactly resembling the blotches and ra- mifications on the egg which it is intended to represent, is painted upon it, in some adhesive body colour, which when complete, and coming from the hands of a finished professor' would not only pass muster in the cabinets of the generality of amateurs, but might deceive even the most learned of our scientific otilogists."

Mr. Knox no doubt, escapes this last misfortune, but it is only, we fear, by ;eking the eggs himself. It is the fresh or living knowledge, like that contained in the above quotation, that distinguishes Mr. Knox whether he is sketching a landscape, narrating his own adventures, describing the habits of his subjects, or discussing various questions con- nected with them. We might quote many descriptions of "land- scape, with figures and game," and many sketches of wild birds and their actions ; but we prefer taking something that further exhibits the knowledge the author continually infuses into his subjects. The first of the following fables has been pictured, and it figures in numerous shop-windows for the edification of her Majesty's townspeople in natural history.

By the way, there are two fables connected with the habits of the heron, yet both of them pass current with the greater part of the world as esta- blished facts in its natural history. One is, that he presents his beak to his enemy so as to transfix him when the latter is about to stoop.' Indeed, the awkward and lumbering movements of the heron at this critical moment show that even if he were disposed to try the experiment, he has no power to bring this formidable weapon into play against his swift and vigorous an- tagonist; whose mode of attack, indeed, as well as the rapidity of its execu- tion, would render such a result exceedingly improbable for the swoop is made obliquely, not perpendicularly, and the falcon strikes her quarry from behind. When the falcons and the heron have reached the ground, then matters assume a different aspect. The moment he finds himself on terra firma he shows a bold front, and struggles to be revenged on hispersecutors by well-directed and quickly-repeated plunges of his sharp and dagger-like

bk. Then indeed must the falconer hurry to the spot, or he may find that his hawks have caught a Tartar.' A mortal wound, serious laceration, or the loss of sight, might be the price of victory. The heron always aims at the eye. I am acquainted with a gentleman who was deprived of one of the organs of vision by a bird of this species which he had incautiously seized after it had been wounded. I have elsewhere recorded a narrow escape of toy own from a similar misfortune; and I shot for two seasons in Ireland over an old pointer—and a capital dog he was—whose loss of one eye was attributable to an imprudent attack during his younger days on a winged heron.

"Another popular error in connexion with this bird is, that duringjnou- bation it is in the habit of protruding its legs through two holes in the bot- tom of its nest. Now there is no reason in the world why the heron should assume an attitude so painful and unnatural. Its legs are certainly long, but the bones of which they are composed (the femur, the tibia, and the tar- sus) bear the same relative proportion to each other as in the generality of waders, and can be as easily folded up underneath the body as the legs of any other bird."