446 REVIEWS. 



The skill and patience which Mr. Wolf has displayed in his efforts 

 to render these drawings faithful copies of their living originals 

 deserve the highest commendation. Li selecting characteristic atti- 

 tudes of the birds and mammals, carefully preserving the relative 

 proportions of their different parts, and depicting, with minute 

 detail, the most striking peculiarities of each, he has here, as in his 

 previous works, been eminently successful. 



On the utility of the entire collection it would be a waste of 

 words to dwell. Some of the species have never been represented 

 before ; of others, no better figures are known to us than such as 

 have been filled up from the imperfect outline sketches of travellers, 

 too often executed in haste, and under circumstances which rendered 

 accuracy impossible, or, still worse, the would-be restorations on 

 paper of Museum specimens already far gone in the last stage of de- 

 naturalisation : ill-killed, ill-skinned, ill-kept, ill-stretched, and finally, 

 ill-stuffed. If we except the " ELnowsley Menagerie," prepared many 

 years since under the auspices of the late Earl of Derby, no work 

 has ever been published in Britain at all comparable in its aim or 

 mode of execution to that before us. 



Every plate is accompanied with a page of explanatory letter- 

 press, prepared for the purpose by our colleague, Mr. Sclater. His 

 object has been to present, in this brief space, a selection of the more 

 remarkable facts touching the history of the animals figured, their 

 distribution, economic value, and suitability for acclimatisation. The 

 various means by which the specimens were obtained for the collec- 

 tion of the Society, with a few particulars as to their habits in a state 

 of captivity, have, where such information seemed necessary, been 

 duly recorded. 



Students of the higher Vertebrata, who have had the privilege of 

 consulting this series, will not be slow on future occasions to turn 

 again to its pages, whenever their studies demand the employment of 

 an aid so pleasing in the work of identification. But to a far more 

 extended class than these it cannot fail to commend itself; to all, in 

 short, who, with feelings of gratitude, can admire those qualities of 

 hand and mind which have enabled the artist to embody, in a form 

 available to others, his own genial appreciation of the finished pro- 

 ductions of Nature. 



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