NATURAL HISTORY BOOKS.*

THE second volume of Mr. J. G. Millais'a splendid work on British Diving Ducks' is in all respects a worthy companion to the previous volume, which was reviewed in the Spectator of June 28th, 1913. The three genera now dealt with are the eiders, scoters, and mergansers. There are also chapters on duck-shooting and on the keeping of ducks in captivity. Mr. Millais writes with the knowledge of a keen and untiring observer, with the learning gained from much reading of ornithological literature, and with the results of the study of a vast series of skins at his disposal. He is able to add much to our knowledge. The changes of plumage, the habits of the ducks and their sex-displays have never been so thoroughly treated. The local races are critically examined.

• (1) British Diving Ducks. By 3. G. Millais. F.Z.S., So. Vol. With 42 ptes (17 of which are coloured) by Archibald Thorburn, O. Murray Dixon, HBO nvold, and the Author. London: Lo yd and Co. [12 gnineee the two vols.]—(21 Oar Common Sea-Bird,. By Percy B. Lowe, B.A.. MX., B.C., Sc. London Country 'Lip. [lbs. net.]—(s) The Gannet a Bird with a ifisterv. By J. H. Gurney, F.Z.S. Illustrated. with numerous photographs. maps, and drawings, and one coloured' plate by Joseph Wolf. London, Witherby and po, 2J,. 64- net.]—(4) The Courtship of4nima4. By W. P. Pycraft, P.Z.B., Se. With 40 plates on art paper, containing over BO illustration,. Loudon: Hutchinson and Co. [6s. net.]-15) The Moots. By Agnes Heeler. With 0 full-page illustrations by Patten Wilson. London A. and C. Bled, [3.. net.]—(6) Highways and Byways of the Books:mot Barden,. By Constance Inn. Pocock. Barre publishers and prim—(T) Cassell!. Natural History. By R Martin Duncan, P.B.P.S., de. With 16 coloured plates and more than 200 illustrations from photographs by the author. London: Cassell and Co. goe. net. —63) Popular Batumi Hillery. By Henry &harrow P.B.S. With

in colour. 13 full-page plates, and numerous illustrations in the

toot. time publishers. [is.

The plumage of the young from the down-stage is traced. A. feature of the book is the series of photographs of skins showing changes of plumage. It would not be easy to over- praise the coloured plates. They are magnificent examples of artistic colour-printing. The work, now complete in two bulky and costly tomes, is one of which British ornithologists have every reason to be proud, although some of the beet of the coloured plates are printed in Berlin.

An addition to " The Country Life Library" with the title Our Common Sea-Birds, contains an exceedingly good account of the cormorants, terns, gulls, skuas, petrels, and auks by Dr. Percy R. Lowe. He is a competent ornithologist, a traveller, and an observer who is, moreover, thoroughly in touch with modern work. He writes without dry technicality, and dwells rather on the habits and food of these groups of sea-birds which' divide them into "oceanic" and "shore" birds. The kittiwake, though a gull, falls, oddly enough, into the oceanic group with the petrels and auks. Its food explains this.- Dr. Lowe writes rather for the field naturalist than the museum student. Mr. Ogilvie-Grant and Mr. Pycraft have some contributions to the drier side of ornithology, and Mr. 0. Pike describes his adventures in photographing the skims. But the chief feature of the book is, of course, the great and wonderful collection of photographs of living birds in their haunts. Nothing finer has ever been done, and we have some of the latest work of our best bird-photographers. We will only mention Miss Turner, Dr. Heatherley, Mr. B. Beetham, Mr. G. A. Booth, Mr. A. J. R. Roberts, and Mr. 0. Pike among the many contributors. The result is a magni- ficent tribute to the skill and art that have been developed in bird-photography.

Charles II. used to say that the two things which he hated most in Scotland were the Solemn League and Covenant and the solan geese. The gannet, or solan goose, is now rarely eaten, even by the Scotch ; but it remains a bird of extraordi- nary interest. The prodigious and exhaustive monograph on The Gannet' which Mr. J. H. Gurney, with almost Tentonio erudition and industry, has recently produced is also a book of extraordinary interest to ornithologists. Mr. Gurney opens with an apology for writing five hundred and sixty pages on a single bird. We should be willing to read his book if it were double the length were it only half the weight. He has col- lected everything that has been written about gannets, from the poems of Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle down to the scientific papers of modern anatomists. He gives even an appendix with figures of mallophaga and other parasites of the species. There is some repetition and little attempt at compression; but we do not cavil at this, for the result is a priceless collection of material for the history of an interesting bird. Gannets are of the pelican family. They are essentially birds of the North Atlantic and, in a narrower sense, British birds. For out of the fifteen breeding stations on the globe no less than nine are in our islands. St. Kilda is the capital of the gannet world. Mr. Gurney attempts a census of the gannet population and gives the history of each breeding rock. There are nesting-places in the Faroes and in Iceland, and two more across the Atlantic at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. These latter have been in some danger from fishermen, who used the birds for bait. Our own Lundy Island, which we know has had a gannet population since at least 1274, is now unhappily deserted. But there is hope that with the end of persecution the birds may come back. The gannet is an increasing species. It is a bird of slow growth, vast muscular power, and probably lives over a hundred years. It lays but one egg and, as Peter Swave, a Dane who came to the Bass Rock in 1535, discovered, batches it under its foot. Absence

of nostrils, subcutaneous air-cavities, a peculiar knob on the tongue, totipalmate feet, a pectinated claw, and many

other points in the bird's anatomy are noteworthy. Mr.

Gurney is a personal observer, a careful ornithologist who has visited several of the gannets' breeding-places, who

has kept gannets in captivity, who has dug deeply in ancient

records. The result of his labour of love is a fat and valuable volume well illustrated with photographs, drawings, and maps.

We have failed to detect any point that has escaped his atten- tion, except that in his Appendix C on parasites he has omitted to mention that the gannet's nest is the home of a rare and peculiar flea, Ceratophyllus borealis, It has also been caught on rook-pipits. The next book on our list treats not only of birds, but of

the love-making and the coyness of animals generally. Mr. W. P. Pycraft is a trained and a learned zoologist. When he writes a popular, or shall we say semi-popular P book on The Courtship of Animals,. the reader has a comfortable feeling that be will be supplied with accurate facts and up-to-date knowledge. And the reader will not, on the whole, be deceived. We have noticed two or three erroneous statements, which are probably attributable to the book being written in a hurry. The subject is not a new one; though Mr. Pycraft has managed to say much on even the stalest parts of it that is fresh, stimulating, and original. His book is rather too long ; that is to say, it would have been improved by careful revision and compression. Mr. Pycraft, who covers the whole animal world from anthropoid apes to arthropods and molluscs in his survey, makes sexual selection and the display or amorous dalliance which precedes the act of pairing his main theme. The line of argument which he adopts is that sexual selection, in the older Darwinian sense, does not exist. The females do not, in fact, choose; and Darwin himself often seemed to have doubts about parts of his theory. When one passes from mammals and birds to reptiles and amphibians the change from warm to cold blooded lovers is apparent. Still, in the majority of animal& fantastic displays of amorous feelings are frequent. Mr. Pycraft describes these and seeks to explain them. He maintain that to some extent they are aphrodisiacs to attract the female, without whose consent pairing is impossible. The ornamental features which many male animals develop, and the displays which they indulge in, may also be attributed to hormones or secretions of certain ductless glands about which we are still very ignorant. Mr. Pycraft is also impressed with Mr. H. Eliot Howard's original observations on the courtships of the warblers. Courtship, in the sense in which it is used in this book, is a wide term. It includes the fights of stags and sea-lions and the antics of spiders and scorpions. A stag, or in fact any animal, in the rutting season ie a terrible creature. The word " courtship " is indeed a euphemism. There are a great number of exceedingly good illustrations from photographs and drawings. The pleasure of the reader is slightly marred especially in the earlier chapters, by a senseless profusion of inverted commas.

We come next to one of those biographies of individual animals which are so much in vogue. The Moose' is a finely told animal story which does Miss Agnes Herbert credit, and will greatly increase her reputation. The reader follows the history of ' Moosewa ' from his birth on the islet in an Alaskan river till he is a giant bearing horns with an eighty-inch spread. There are no dull parts in the story, and there is much about the habits of other wild creatures, bears, beavers, wolverines, and caribou, that shows minutely accurate knowledge. But the humming-bird (p. 158) must have been blown far beyond its normal northern range. The old cow moose is shot and the youngster passes for a while into captivity, from which Sadie, a kind-hearted mistress, releases Min. The years of prime follow, with escapee from wolves and other adventures and times of love. In winter our hero is the boss bull of his yards. He is "completely happy," as Miss Herbert would have us believe that healthy beasts are. Then the fates lead him to swim across to the Kenia Peninsula. He fights and thrashes a great one-eyed rival. His cow falls wounded by a prospector's bullet, and our hero, lured by the moose-caller, is shot and mortally wounded. He eludes the English sportsmen, and his massive antlers are fished from a river and pass into the possession of a New York club. It makes a fine tale.

From wild we must lead the reader to captive animals. The visitor to the Zoological Gardens can have no safer or cheerier guide than Mrs. Pocock. She knows intimately the animals and their keepers and cages, their food, their history, and their whims or habits. Highways and Byways of the Zoological Gardens, has a number of very good photographs of animals to make it attractive to those who like a little anecdotic natural history. Most of these are by Mr. Seth- Smith. Mrs. Pocock takes the reader from cage to cage, chatting and imparting such information as one would desire to receive from a guide who is so fortunate as to have her home in the Superintendent's house at Regent's Park. Some pages are reprinted from the Queen and the Windsor Magasine. It is not a learned book, but the note of personal reminiscence

gives it a character of its own; and of several books about the Gardens that have recently appeared it is among the best.

There ie place fora really popular general "Natural History" which, while suited to the young, ie yet accurate and scientific. Two hooks which have recently appeared and which give a survey of the whole animal kingdom hardly fill the gap. The troth seems to be that no one man can hope to compile such a book in a fashion to satisfy those who have real knowledge of special groups. Cassell's Natural History,' by Mr. F. Martin Duncan, begins with the microscopic protozoa. So long as the author writes on the marine invertebrates which he has studied his text is fairly satisfactory, and the photographs (all by himself) which illustrate it are exceptionally good. Insects are less satisfactory. Finally, only ninety pages (out of four hundred and ten) are devoted to mammals, which from the general reader's standpoint are the most important Nor can the treatment of reptiles and birds he called satis- factory or adequate. It is a misfortune that Mr. Duncan did not end with Amphioxus and Balanoglossns, leaving the vertebrates to other hands. The early chapters, as we have said, are well written and cover a small portion of the subject, though they unfortunately often fail to convey to the reader any idea of the great groups into which animals are classified. The book is excellently printed, and for its size not heavy.

The second book is Mr. Henry Scherren's Popular Natural History,. a work of humbler appearance and very moderate in price. It is profusely illustrated with fair drawings and modern photographs from many sources. It opens with ma- and the higher vertebrates, to which far the larger part of the volume is devoted. The text is simply written, suited for boys and girls, without Latin names or hard words. At whatever point we have tested it the information has proved as adequate and as accurate as can be expected in such a book.