368 Review of the Memoir of Tlioraas Bewick. 



Meantime I have found another nest, and shall wait until 

 the laying is completed to be able to render a further account 

 about its time. 



Waldkircli, March 31, 1862. 



XLIV. — Review of the recently published Memoir o/ Bewick*. 



Two centuries have elapsed since Willughby and Ray first took 

 to noting and cataloguing British birds, and since the worthy Sir 

 T. Browne sketched and coloured the birds and fishes of Norfolk 

 to illustrate Ray's edition of the ' Ornithologia.' Yet though the 

 Norwich doctor had to complain that his drawings were never 

 returned, we fear that his friend did not use them to such good 

 purpose as to popularize his favourite study. It was the pages 

 of Gilbert White and the woodcuts of Bewick which first be- 

 guiled the English schoolboy to the observation of our feathered 

 friends. From Ray to Linnseus is a long, dreary interval — the 

 dark ages of natural history in this country. ''^The boy is 

 father of the man." Few men have ever attained eminence in 

 science whose minds were not early attracted to the subject; and 

 when style has happily combined with truth and nature to rivet 

 the attention of childhood, no slight service has been rendered 

 to the cause of natural history. Vast as has been the advance 

 in systematic knowledge within the last half-century, how few 

 of our living naturalists but must gratefully acknowledge their 

 early debt to White's ' History ' and to the life-like woodcuts of 

 Bewick ! Probably we shall not wrong the cultivated annalist of 

 Selborne by giving the first place to Bewick. We are tempted to 

 believe that for one studious schoolboy whose latent taste has been 

 evoked by the former, a dozen have been led " how to observe " 

 by conning over ' The British Birds ' on a holiday afternoon in 

 their father's library. Yet Bewick has not the slightest claim 

 to rank with Gilbert White as a naturalist. White was what Be- 

 wick never was, a man of science j but, if no naturalist, Bewick 

 was a lover of nature, a careful observer, and a faithful copier of 

 her ever-varying forms. In this, and this alone, lies his charm. 



* Memoir of Thomas Bewick, written hy himself. NewcastlCj Ward ; 

 London, Longman and Co. 



