348 NATURAL SCIENCE. May. 



Mr. Briggs becomes Naturalist. 



By Tangled Paths. By H. Mead Briggs. Svo. Pp. 203. London : F. Warne 

 and Co., 1896. Price 3s. 6d. 



We liked Mr. Briggs better in the old days, as the plain paterfamilias, 

 the friend of Mr. Punch. But now, Mr. Briggs has become 

 degenerate : he has joined the Natural History Club of the South- 

 Eastern College, Ramsgate; he has swilled draughts of Albert Chevalier 

 and the Poet Laureate ; he has poured an uncooked mixture of his 

 scraps into the columns of the Kentish Gazette ; and, worst of all, he 

 has, by a charmingly got-up reprint of his essays (for which all credit 

 is due to the publishers) enticed us into reading them for purposes of 

 review. 



His rambles have indeed led poor Mr. Briggs into tangled paths. 

 So long as he sticks to matter of fact we cannot complain : " Nature 

 has many moods," " Death is no respecter of persons," " Colds are at 

 all times undesirable." " Something is wrong somewhere " — true, O 

 Briggs ! But we cannot fully subscribe to such statements as these : 

 " Everywhere in winter one finds treachery," " the reaper putteth in 

 his sickle and the blade [_sic] is severed." The kingfisher's eggs 

 '' blush with lovely pink lent by the conscious [!] yolk within." At 

 Folkestone, " along the heights to this very day 



' In the whirlwind o'er the spray 

 They behold the halcyon play.' " 

 The old naturalists did, it is true, suppose that kingfishers " sat 

 brooding on the charmed wave," but it was reserved for a Briggs to 

 see them above the breakers of the Channel. But then Mr. Briggs 

 does wonderful things : he can hear a bee's heart beating, as we infer 

 from a statement on p- 14 ; he knows that hedgehogs dream all the 

 while they hibernate, they dream " of golden summer days, when the 

 nightingales sang love melodies " ; he knows that " the poet's Lorelei 

 sat on the beetling heights above the sea, luring the sailor and his 

 ship to destruction on the cruel rocks below, 



' while softly flowed the Rhine.' " 



Ah, yes ! the poets ! Mr. Briggs is fond of poets. We wonder if 

 they are fond of Mr. Briggs, lor he drags them into all impossible 

 connections, not without abundant mis-quotation, even laying impious 

 hands on " Hymns Ancient and IModern," as thus : " The strange 

 wild cry of the wandering owl echoes back amid the deepening gloom, 



* O'er moor, o'er [s/V] fen, o'er crag, or [s?f] torrent till 



the night is gone.' " 

 or again : *' birds of gloom, 



' Like the shadows of the evening, 

 Softly steal across the sky.' " 

 Mr. Briggs is indeed a veritable Malaprop : he talks about " the 

 shores of Babylon"; he calls an owl "the goose with the golden egg"; 

 he speaks of the chaffinch's " feathered vocalism," as though it sang 

 with its head under the bedclothes ; he thinks that " where ignorance 

 is bliss, etc.," is an old proverb ; in parody of Shakespeare he tells us 

 that " the blackbird tuned his orange bill " ; he adds to the English 

 language the words " discomforture " and " squallid " ; and he thinks 

 that " Revolted daughters" have grown so " mannish " that they will 

 " beget " children who " will probably never know their parents." 



The readers of the Kentish Gazette take their Briggs in instal- 

 ments ; but who shall swallow this warmed-up farrago of a book ? 

 Never mind ! they that have the courage to attempt it may get 

 many another jest from its pages, not all examples of conscious 



