CURRENT LITERATURE
PORTRAITS IN THE LONDON ZOO. By Silvia Baker. (Chiswick Press. 15s.) THESE portraits are pen-drawings very slightly tinted. They are clever and pleasing, but the artist is evidently obseased by the likeness of animals to men, and they nearly all have noticeably human expressions, especially, of course, the monkeys. The half-page or so of letterpress attached to each portrait or each group of portraits is invariably well done, and contains scraps of very interesting information, and where it is difficult to believe it is usually well supported by good authority. The American puma, a most bland-looking animal, we learn will not attack a man nor even defend itself against one. It kills sheep, horses and cattle and monkeys, but not men :- " W. H. Hudson goes so far as to say that a puma has been Imown to defend a man against a jaguar. Moreover he says that a cornered puma will sit perfectly still while a man approaches it with a knife. Trembling, whining pitifully and with tears running down its cheeks, it waits in fatalistic resignation for death."
Mr. Hudson's evidence is irrefutable. The amazing fact that a bird should talk would not, we think, be believed if parrots were but newly discovered. As it is this human peculiarity is very uncanny. It is not its only resemblance to man :-
" The progress of senile decay in the parrot is not unlike that in the human being. Its memory becomes weak after sixty, at sixty-five its tail becomes scanty, at ninety blindness sets in, the vocabulary becomes limited, and its years arc numbered."
Do people still buy books to lay upon tables that they may be " looked at " ? If they do this is the book for them. While he is turning the leaves no guest will be dull.
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