308 BihUugrapJiical Notice. 



connected account of its birds was published ; and that consisted of 

 a list, meagre in the amount of information it conveyed, and, as the 

 book now before us shows, inaccurate in many respects. Numerous 

 ornithologists in the mean time have visited this interesting group 

 of islands, but none have made a sufficiently long stay to do more 

 than communicate to the world an occasional note, except the 

 lamented author of ' The Birds of Shetland,' who, unfortunately, 

 has not lived to complete his manuscript, much less to see any 

 portion of it in the printer's hands. Fraternal affection, however, 

 has supplied the remainder from the late Dr. Saxby's note-books ; 

 and Mr. Stephen Saxby is, we think, on the whole to be congTatu- 

 lated on the way in which he has edited his deceased brother's 

 work ; for, though not pretending to scientific distinction, his sym- 

 pathies are so clearly turned that way, and he is so highly apprecia- 

 tive of the author's labours, that his seK-imposed duty is far better 

 done than is usual in similar cases. He remarks, and rightly as it 

 seems to us, in his preface, that the present book differs from all 

 the numerous monographs by which in this generation British 

 ornithology has been so largely promoted, because 



" It tells of a most marked and rapid change in a Fauna actually 

 going in a direction the very opposite of that which we are accus- 

 tomed to deplore as the result of the development of material 

 prosperity and of increasing civilization. It is true that the custo- 

 mary issue of contact with this latter force is being only too griev- 

 ously seen in the case of some few species, but as regards a large 

 number of others the accession is very decided. The planting a 

 few trees, carefuUy sheltered by stone walls from the sweeping 

 gales of the Atlantic, has had a curiously marked effect in attract- 

 ing birds hitherto unknown as visitors to the islands ; an effect, 

 indeed, altogether disproportionate to the small scale on which the 

 experiment has been tried. The extensive and often extremely 

 rich peat-groimds of Shetland attest, not only by their existence, 

 but by the occasional conservation of the actual roots and trunks, 

 the former prevalence of luxuriant forest growth where all is now a 

 treeless wild ; though, in the present state of our knowledge as to 

 the distribution of species, none may venture to assume that at that 

 remote epoch it would have been possible for the Fauna to have 

 been as in these days. There can, however, be little doubt that in 

 numerous instances as the author was adding to the Shetland list 

 now one and now another of our southern birds, he was but chroni- 

 cling the return, after the lapse of many a century, of a species re- 

 appearing after its long exile." 



We might, perhaps, take exception to the supposition of a few 

 plantations " attracting " these visitors ; but if, instead, we read 

 " retaining," the passage seems to be unexceptionable, and, indeed, 

 is somewhat consoling ; for the proofs that " Man marks the earth 

 with ruin " are but too distinctly traced in the vanishing faunas of 

 group after group of islands ; nor does his dominion over the fowls 

 of the air, like his control over the rest of nature, " stop at the 

 shore."' But we must remark that these successive points of 



