8 NATURAL SCIENCE. julv. 



the material was collected by the United States Fish Commission. 

 The beautiful monograph by Mr. Savile Kent on the Great Barrier 

 Reef {see Natural Science, vol. ii., pp. 453-460) is of at least equal 

 economic importance, and serves the better to point the present 

 moral, in that the expense of the exploration and of the publication of 

 the volume was largely borne by the Government of Queensland. 



Another article in the same issue of the Quarterly is of greater 

 length and equal scientific interest. It makes a demand, not upon 

 the pockets of the ratepayers, but on the fortitude with which they 

 shall see the breaking of an old idol. It has been one of the most 

 popular of our beliefs that Shakespeare was as faithful a depicter of 

 birds and beasts as he was of human nature. But the generation of 

 critics who have palmed upon us this belief have themselves been no 

 naturalists. In this article the "natural history" of Shakespeare is 

 shown to consist almost entirely of literary conventions. In the 

 majority of cases, instead of observing for himself, he has been 

 content to borrow uncritically from his predecessors. 



The Jungle Book. 

 Another writer, who, if he be not read two hundred years after 

 this as much as Shakespeare is read to-day, yet is read more to-day 

 than was Shakespeare by his contemporaries, has written much of 

 animals. But, in addition to the fact that discussing the " Nature 

 writing " of our greatest English writer leads us to the " Nature 

 writing " of our own days, we make no apology for directing the 

 attention of all naturalists who have still that good fortune before 

 them to Mr. Rudyard Kipling's new book. It is an old and not 

 unfounded reproach that too close a scrutiny of the mechanism of the 

 organic world tends to destroy for anatomists the romance of the 

 living world. For them too often Nature becomes an explicable or 

 partially explicable mechanism and an animal a bundle of tissues to 

 be dissected, or the mere seat of functions to be explored and measured. 

 A great novelist once said that the best novels were Nature seen 

 through a temperament; Here is a book about animals seen through 

 a temperament, very different from that generally in association with 

 biological investigation. It is written in the spirit of primitive races, 

 to whom the beasts and the birds of the field and the forest are 

 a people, with their own language and customs, for whom the woods 

 and the plains are full of the mysterious glamour of life. The book 

 tells of the battles and the alliances of animals, of the noon-day heat 

 of the plains, and the stealthy bustle of the night. Keen observation 

 and the artistic method employed by Mr. Kipling in his stories 

 of man do not fail him in these stories of animals, nor is there 

 wanting evidence of that peculiar turn of mind by which Mr. 

 Kipling sees in the canons of army life the supreme standard 

 of moral excellence. But criticism, as the author himself would say, 

 "is another story." Of the tales in the "Jungle Book," two in especial 



