206 NATURAL SCIENCE [September 



reptiles, amphibians, fishes, and cyclostomes ; Dr R Bowdler Sharpe 

 for the birds ; Mr Garstang for amphioxus and balanoglossus ; Mr 

 W. F. Kirby for the arthropods ; Mr B. B. "Woodward for the mol- 

 luscs ; Mr Bather for the lamp shells and starfishes ; Mr Kirkpatrick 

 for the moss animals ; Mr Pocock for the " worms " ; and Mr and 

 Mrs Bernard for the coelenterates and the protozoa. There is, of 

 course, a good deal of excellent work in the book, which is a marvel 

 of cheapness ; but some of the sections dealing with vertebrata read 

 as if they were made up of popular newspaper articles, hurriedly, and 

 not very skilfully, welded together. The best part of the book is that 

 dealing with the lowest vertebrates and the invertebrates. The sections 

 on lamp shells and starfishes deserve special mention; and students of 

 the bryozoa will be grateful to Mr Kirkpatrick for appending to 

 his section a classification and bibliography. In a second edition it 

 would be well to adopt the same zoo-geographical regions for mammals 

 and birds; and the puzzling sentence on p. 122 — "the teats of the 

 female elephants are placed between the hind legs, and the young calf 

 sucks with its mouth, and not with its trunk " — should be deleted. 

 Stricter supervision, too, should be exercised over the illustrations. 

 Fig. 86 (p. 156) bears the inscription Tragclaphus angasi, about which 

 no word occurs in the text ; the inscription of Fig. 82 (p. 349) does 

 not refer to the bird figured ; the illustration of the bearded reedling 

 (p. 368) bears the generic name Calamophilus, while Panurus is given 

 in the text, though it does not appear in the index. The misprints, 

 of which there are considerably more than are justly chargeable to the 

 printer, should be carefully sought for and corrected. Alunda, Teirao, 

 Phasiandae, Paro, Syrrhoptes, Scolopaeinae, Nydierax nycticrax, Try- 

 panns, Anthrophysa (and many others) are likely to prove hindrances 

 rather than helps ; and some readers may stumble at " catenanan 

 formation." " Pellage," too, is an unusual form in English books ; 

 while " Leydecker " and " Brydden " conceal familiar names. 



Moths 



A Handbook to the Order Lepidoptera. By W. F. Kirby, F.L.S., F.E.S. Vol. 

 V. Moths. Part 3. 8vo, pp. 332, plates 32. (Allen's Naturalist's Library.) 

 London : W. H. Allen & Co., 1897. Price, 6s. 



With praiseworthy celerity, Mr Kirby has brought his handbook of 

 lepidoptera to a conclusion. It is unfortunate that his account of the 

 noctuids, the geometers, and the whole of the so-called " micro- 

 lepidoptera " has had to be compressed into the volume now before 

 us. The space is quite inadequate for a clue treatment of these groups, 

 especially as the author continues to devote a quarter or half a page 

 to the synonymy and references of each species which he selects for 

 description. Although a large number of moths are described and 

 figured, the families are necessarily much more cursorily treated than 

 those dealt with in the preceding volumes. For example, among the 

 noctuids we find only one British species, each of such large genera as 

 Acronyeta, Lcucaui/*, and Ayrotis, and not a single representative of 

 Hadena ; and turning to the geometers, the large and important 

 genera Eiipithecia and Cidaria are altogether omitted. As for the 

 " microlepidoptera," Mr Kirby states in his preface that he has found 



