1885.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 265 



items. Newfoundland is shown to be a land of a forbidding coast- 

 line, but having splendid inland pastoral and wooded plains, the 

 latter of which promise to be speedily destroyed by forest fires. 

 The question of droughts in Jamaica, now far more prevalent than 

 formerly, is referred to the indiscriminate cutting down of its 

 valuable timber trees by negroes for land, who then leave the 

 patches they had previously cultivated to merge into jungle. In 

 this way thousands of acres are destroyed, and the probability of a 

 serious diminution of rainfall hurried on. The timber trade of 

 Belize, British Honduras, is looking up ; in fact, the supply of 

 mahogany and logwood appears to be inexhaustible, though the 

 mahogany cutters have now to go far into the forest, and to spend 

 much in transporting their heavy logs to the water-portage. 



The Great Auk or Garcfoui (Alca impennis, Linn) : Its History, 

 Archcvologjj, and Remains. By Symington Grieve, Edinburgh. 

 London: Thomas C. Jack. 1885. 



This splendid quarto, with its quaint representation of the lost bird of 

 our northern seas, and beautifully coloured plates of eggs, specimens 

 of which were lately sold for more than £100 each, belongs to a 

 type of library treasures which used to be honoured by the best 

 place on the shelves, but are now being displaced by the more 

 ephemeral productions called into demand by Mudie's and similar 

 circulating libraries. Ornithology, according to its most enthusiastic 

 votaries, is shamefully neglected, and this plaint may be true regard- 

 ing living birds. But the Garefowl, some 3 feet high or so, with 

 white specks like the optician's aids to vision below its eyes, con- 

 trasting as strangely with the black head, razor bill, and white 

 downy breast, disappears from the list of living species some time 

 about 1844 ; and at length it has received a literary monument of 

 a far more permanent character than many of the stone ones 

 erected to humble poets and scientists whom we allowed to 

 starve while living. We must refer our readers to the pages of 

 this most interesting and exhaustive monograph for all that can be 

 said about the Great Auk. 



La Foret for July contains a plea by Marcel Tailis for the removal 

 of the Forest School from Nancy to Paris, where the course of 

 study of the Agronomic Institute, the training-school of young 

 French agriculturists, might form the preliminary course to be 

 taken by the Government forest students. 



