70 Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 
history of the Church and the various objects of interest, including the 
well-known churchwardens’ accounts, which it possesses. The writer aims at 
popularity, and in places he is, perhaps, over “ popular,” and waters down 
the architectural portions over much. It is interesting to note that the old 
Norman font has lately been restored to the Church by Mr. Waters. 
The English Ancestry of the Families of Batt and 
Biley, by J. Henry Lea. Boston: David Clapp & 
Son, Printers, 18977. A royal 8vo pamphlet of twenty-five pp., 
reprinted from the New England Historical and Genealogical Register: 
April, 1897. : 
The ancestors of both these families, of some standing in Salisbury, 
emigrated in 1638 to New England, and settled at Salisbury, Mass., an 
earlier emigrant—Nicholas Batt, of Devizes—having settled at Newbury, 
Mass., in 1635. The author of this paper gives a long series of entries of 
Batts in the registers of the Cathedral, S. Martin’s, S. Thomas’, and S. 
Edmund's, Salisbury; St. John’s, Devizes; Potterne; marriage licenses 
from the Sarum Diocesan Registry; and abstracts of wills proved in the 
Consistory Court of Sarum and the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. A 
genealogy of the family of Batt, with pedigrees illustrating the connection 
of the Bileys and Batts, completes a valuable contribution to American 
family history. 
The Salisbury Ornithological Calendar. Under this title 
the Salisbury Journal of December 25th, 1897, reports at length a lecture 
delivered by the Rev. A. P. Morres at the Blackmore Museum. The lecture, 
as all Mr. Morres’ lectures and papers do, contains many facts of great 
interest to the bird lovers of the county. Ravens, for instance, he tells us 
are, still to be seen on the downs near Amesbury, though they have ceased to 
breed as they did years ago at Tedworth. The numbers of the Duck, too, in 
the meadows at Longford, will be a revelation to many. The pith of the 
lecture, however, lay in the paper on “ Close Time”’ with which it concluded. 
Mr. Morres urges the strict observance of the legal close time for breeding 
birds, but he goes on to urge that the collector having observed the close 
time is perfectly at liberty to shoot as many rare birds as he pleases directly 
it is over, and that nobody has any right to find fault with him for doing 
so. He is by no means to shoot the Golden Oriole nesting in his garden 
between March Ist and July 31st, but on August 1st he may satisfy his 
collecting instinct by shooting the whole family, and having them stuffed, 
for Mr. Morres argues elaborately that the rare bird fulfils its mission in 
life by getting shot and giving joy to the individual collector who is 
fortunate enough to secure him as a specimen, ignoring the whole point 
that the individual collector is purchasing his own pleasure at the cost of 
depriving the whole body of naturalists in the country not only now, but. 
for all future time, also, of the pleasure of seeing or knowing anything 
whatever about the particular species which he has done his best to help to 
exterminate. Who is responsible for the practical disappearance of the 
