REVIEWS 523 



suggested further that the apparent capacity of a fruit-body to withstand the effect 

 of ether-vapour for such a lengthened period as a week requires further investiga- 

 tion, as do also the cytological changes occurring in the hymenium and basidia of 

 fruit-bodies when revived after desiccation for many months. It is to be regretted 

 also that the author was unable to publish the chief of his new results in some 

 scientific journal, as he originally intended. The publication of his work in book- 

 form alone and at a high price will certainly delay the dissemination of his results 

 among working botanists, especially abroad. 



In conclusion, it is evident that Prof. Duller is to be congratulated on a fine 

 piece of work in which he breaks new ground not only in the biology of the 

 hymenomycetous fruit-body but in the border-land of botany and physics, 



V. H. Blackman. 



A History of Birds. By W. P. Pycraft, with an Introduction by Sir Ray 

 Lankester. [Pp. 458 -f XXX.] (London; Methuen & Co., 1910. Price 

 lo^-. 6d. net.') 



Mr. Pycraft apparently wrote his book and then encountered the familiar 

 difficulty, unusually great in a subject on which so many books have been written, 

 of choosing a title ; in any case the title selected does less than justice to the 

 intention of the volume. Mr. Pycraft's own preface and the delightful introduction 

 by Sir Ray Lankester explain that the purpose of the writer was to set out the 

 interplay of inherited constitution and moulding environment in producing the 

 characters of living birds. The scheme is attractive, the author is an expert 

 anatomist and a keen observer, the result is admirable. A notable body of 

 exact information upon structure, classification, habits and instincts is ingeniously 

 combined to form a coherent series of studies ; the illustrations, both technical 

 text-figures and pictorial plates, are excellent in themselves and pertinent to the 

 argument. Those learned persons to whom the facts may be already familiar will 

 take pleasure and profit from seeing them acquire a new significance from their 

 new setting, whilst to the beginner in ornithology Mr. Pycraft's book will serve as 

 a stimulating introduction and a compendious text-book. Most zoologists will 

 learn much from Mr. Pycraft, will accept many of his inferences and dispute not 

 a few of them. And what better can one say of a book ? 



Mr. Pycraft begins with an admirably clear account of the distinctive structural 

 characters of birds, and then deals in broad outline with their ancestral history and 

 the possibility of arranging them in a phylogenetic tree. He shows that the 

 origin of birds from reptiles is an almost inevitable inference from the reptilian 

 characters found throughout the structure of modern birds, characters still more 

 strongly reptilian in the Jurassic fossil Arc/iaopieryx, which none the less was 

 essentially a bird. He maintains that the evidence points to the descent of birds 

 from arboreal reptiles, and supplies a clever and plausible account of how the 

 gap may have been bridged. His account of the avian palate is naturally some- 

 what elaborate, partly because of the intrinsic importance of that structure in the 

 case of birds, an importance upon which his own contributions to knowledge have 

 led him to lay special stress. It is well known that Huxley, in preparing his 

 famous lectures on birds, treated them as extinct animals, paying special 

 attention to the structure of the bony palate. He distinguished and named the 

 salient types of palatal structure and founded his classification on them. Later 

 workers succeeded in blurring the edges of Huxley's distinctions, showing the 

 existence of transitional forms and of misleading convergent resemblances. 

 Mr. Pycraft himself put back the subject on a firm basis by showing that there 



