The British Naturalist, " 6S 



little save the remains of insects ; the broken elytra of Cole- 

 optera, for instance ; and never, unless we greatly mistake, 

 any thing like the remains of corn : and for this reason, 

 though it becomes us not absolutely to deny, we yet very 

 much doubt, the fact of the crake ever feeding upon grain, 

 " They are, in general, gone," says our author, " before 

 they can do any injury to the crops." How " gone?" The 

 corncrake is continually met with by the sportsman in the 

 earlier season of partridge-shooting ; and once we remember 

 to have seen one drop to our own gun in the beginning of 

 November. 



The wood-cuts which illustrate these volumes, though by 

 no means of the first quality, call, nevertheless, for a few 

 remarks. Some of them, and some of the best too, are 

 evidently copied from Bewick. We do not Hke them the 

 less on that account : but the spirit of the originals has sadly 

 evaporated in the copies. What we have most to complain 

 of is, that the subjects have not been very judiciously chosen : 

 there are the heron, the kite, the raven, the magpie, the jay, 

 and the jackdaw, with many others, equally familiar to all. It 

 would have been better to have illustrated by figures the less 

 known, rather than the commonest species. If, for example, 

 instead of a portrait of the lark, a bird perfectly well known to 

 every body, the author had presented us with a good delinea- 

 tion of the several kinds of pipits (of which, we are told, there 

 are, at least, three species found in Britain, and these, as it 

 seems, not always clearly understood, but involved in some 

 confusion), we should have felt ourselves under far greater 

 obligations to him. Or, again, we would most willingly have 

 dispensed with all the cuts in the work, to have had in their 

 place accurate figures of those charming, but perplexing 

 tribes, the whitethroats, pettychaps, and willow wrens. The 

 figure of ASphino; (Acher6ntia) A'tropo5 we could have wished 

 had been either a little larger or a little less, and we do not 

 much care which. In the one case it would have been quite 

 palpable that the insect was represented on a diminished 

 scale ; in the other, of its natural size. As it is, it scarcely 

 looks like either one thing or the other, and may mislead the 

 less informed. Of the ornithological frontispiece in the 

 second volume we can say nothing in praise. The birds 

 there represented are stiff and formal in the last degree ; 

 and the cuts, having been made, we suspect, from stuffed spe- 

 cimens, are totally devoid of life and character. We should 

 hardly have recognised the several species, had not their 

 names been underwritten. Then there is in the titlepage 

 opposite a most rural vignette (the artist ruined a useful block 



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