LITERARY NOTICES. 



5 6 3 



/(?'. The whole history of the middle ages is, 

 indeed, the history of a loug war against Nature. 



But Nature has at last prevailed. Delusions 

 are clouds, and the storm of the Thirty Years' 

 War has cleared our sky. The real secret of the 

 astoundiug success of modern science and in- 

 dustry is a general renaissance of naturalism, 

 and the same revival hegins to manifest its in- 

 fluence in the tendencies of modern literature. 

 Ghost-stories are going out of fashion. Like 

 scrofula and other bequests of the middle ages, 

 the sickly pessimism of the sentimental school 

 is yielding to the influence of a revived taste 

 for the pleasures of out-door life. Books of 

 travel, of sports and adventure, historical, zo- 

 ological, and even biological and cosmologica] 

 studies, are fast superseding the historical 

 romances of the last generation. Even the 

 pariahs of our reading-rooms have advanced 

 from ghost-hunts to scalp hunts, from impossi- 

 bilities to improbabilities. And, moreover, the 

 progress of natural science tends to supersede 

 fiction by making it superfluous even for ro- 

 mantic purposes. There is more romance in 

 the travels of Humboldt, more magic in the 

 idyls of Thoreau and the revelations of Darwin 

 and Haeckel, than in all the fancies of the me- 

 diaeval miracle-mongers. The wonders of nature 

 begin to eclipse the wonders of supernaturalism. 

 A Zoological Garden attracts more eight-seers 

 than the best Passion-play. Pan has revived. 



The plan of the present volume is modest 

 enough: its theories are mere suggestions ; its 

 limits have often obliged me to reduce a chapter 

 of zoological adventures to a page of zoological 

 anecdotes. But, in offering it as a contribu- 

 tion to the entertaining literature of the Eng- 

 lish language, my diffidence arises from a dis- 

 trust in my own abilities rather than from 

 the deficient interest of the subject itself, for 

 the history of that literature has repeatedly 

 proved that natural science can be made more 

 attractive than the products of fiction or mys- 

 ticismby just as much as the resources of 

 Nature exceed the resources of her rivals. 



The Codes Check List op North Ameri- 

 can Birds. Second edition, revised to 

 date. With a Dictionary of the Ety- 

 mology, Orthography, and Orthoepy of 

 the Scientific Names. Boston : Estes 

 & Lauriat. Pp. 165. 



The first edition of the "Check List" 

 was published in 1874, and was a bare cata- 

 logue of the scientific and vernacular names. 

 It contained seven hundred and seventy- 

 eight names of species and sub-species, and 

 was prepared with a degree of accuracy that 

 is exhibited by the fact that it has been 

 found necessary in the revision to remove 

 only ten names of duplicates or extra-limital 

 species, while a hundred and twenty names 

 have been added. The large majority of 

 the additions are bona fide species, and 



actual acquisitions to the North American 

 list birds discovered since 1873 in Texas, 

 Arizona, and Alaska, together with several 

 long known to inhabit Greenland. Except 

 in Mr. Ridgway's National Museum cata- 

 logue, which was published after Mr. Coues's 

 list was written, the full list of Greenland 

 birds has never before been incorporated 

 with the North American list. The field of 

 North American fauna is generally bounded 

 by the northern boundary of Mexico. The ob- 

 jection is made that this is a political rather 

 than a scientific limit ; and Mr. Coues sug- 

 gests that it would be more exact to extend 

 the limit, along the highlands at least, to 

 about the Tropic of Cancer. In revising 

 the list, particular attention has been paid 

 to the matter of nomenclature, not only as 

 a part of scientific classification, but also as 

 an affair of writing and speaking the name3 

 of birds correctly; and the work includes, 

 besides the list of the names, a full and 

 scholarly treatise on the etymology, orthog- 

 raphy, and orthoepy of all the scientific and 

 many of the vernacular words employed in 

 the nomenclature, the work in great part 

 of Mrs. S. Olivia Weston-Aiken. 



New Check-List of North American 

 Moths. By August R. Grote, President 

 of the New York Entomological Club. 

 Pp. 75. Price, $1. 



This list contains about four thousand 

 names of species, synonyms, and varieties 

 of the North American Sphingida?, Bom- 

 bycidse, iEgeriada?, Thyridae, Noctuida?, Ge- 

 ometridaj, Pyralidse and Tortricidse. It 

 will be welcome and useful to the student 

 and collector of the interesting insects 

 which it enumerates. The list embraces 

 all recent discoveries and replaces the for- 

 mer catalogues of the author, as it takes in 

 all the species. It also contains some of 

 the results of a partial re-examination of 

 the British Museum collections made by 

 Mr. Grote last winter, and it includes the 

 Tortricidae published by Lord Walsingham, 

 and Professor Fernald's recent arrange- 

 ment of that family. It is well printed, on 

 good paper, uniform in style, with " Pa- 

 pilio," the journal of the New York Ento- 

 mological Club, and it may be had of the 

 secretary of the club, Mr. Ilenry Edwards, 

 No. 185 East One Hundred and Sixteenth 

 Street. 



