410 



NA TURE 



[August 3r, 1893 



great confidence to an early realisation of Mr. Hudson's 

 dream of artificial birds'eggs of such m.igic perfection 

 that schoolboys seeing them will rob birds'-nests no 

 longer, though we agree with him in thinking that the 

 volatile colours of most eggs when blown, make collec- 

 tions of but little lasting value. 



There is in " Birds in a Village," unless we are mis- 

 taken, something which may possibly prove of more 

 practical interest to lovers of good works of natural 

 history than any such agreeable speculations. 



"Travel fever" is a malady easily caught. It is recurrent, 

 and when once caught, seldom completely shaken off until 

 life energy begins to fail and a man nears the starting time 

 for his last journey. There are touches— sometimes rather 

 pathetic— in the book before us which suggests that it was 

 written under the influence of an unusually sharp attack. 

 A few words from a little girl in St. James's Park, 

 " Oh, how I love the birds ! " were enough to start the 

 writer wandering " somewhat aimlessly " about the 

 country till he stumbled on his nightingale-haunted vil- 

 lage and stopped there. " I could not," he writes, 

 " longer keep from the birds, which I, too, loved, for now 

 all at once it seemed to me that life was not life without 

 them, that I was grown sick, and all my senses dim ; 

 that only the wished-for sight of birds could medicine my 

 vision ; that only by drenching it in their melody could 

 my tired brain recover its lost vigour." 



The chapter headed " Chanticleer " is as symptomatic 

 as the passage quoted above. Mr. Hudson tries seriously 

 to persuade himself and his readers that he likes being 

 awakened at three o'clock in the morning by his neigh- 

 bours' cocks ! When he believed himself listening to 

 their crowings he was in a trance, having his eyes open. 

 His body may have lain "on high ground in one of the 

 pleasantest suburbs of London," but he was himself 

 thousands of miles away— lying on the cliff-edge, drop- 

 ping stones to startle the great coots of Patagonia, riding 

 at a swinging gallop through rustling seas of giant thistles 

 into the " mysterious, extra natural, low level plain, green 

 and fresh and snaky, where horsehoofs made no sound," 

 or gazing up at the starry skies of the Pampas. The 

 sounds of which he was really conscious were the con- 

 certs of crested screamers, or the dance music of La 

 Plata rails. 



Mr. Hudson will not think we wish unduly to dispaiaje 

 his " Birds in a Village " if we e.xpress a hope that circum - 

 stances may allow him soon to let Nature have her way, 

 and that before long he may be able again to show us, on 

 larger canvas, other collections of sketches of scenes less 

 easily accessible. 



In these days of high pressure one of the most service- 

 able qualities that a man can possess is the power of 

 self-abstraction — to be able to throw work and worries 

 on one side and bury himself in other interests. In " En- 

 dymion," when the hero's father found money difficul- 

 ties gathering round him, and his political hopes failed 

 at what had seemed the very moment of realisation, he 

 committed suicide " because," says the author, " he had 

 no imagination." The power which could convey Lord 

 Beaconsfield himself at the time of a crushing defeat 

 back to the formal terraces and gardens of the Braden- 

 ham of his boyhood, and enable him there to forget him- 

 self in the hopes and fears of beings of his own creation, 

 NO. 1244, VOL. 48] 



is a gift of the gods to the few. A love of Nature— its 

 best substitute— is a possession scarcely less precious, 

 and one to which every parent may do much to help his 

 children. 



For such an education many more ambitious works 

 could be better spared than the transcripts from the less 

 known pages of " God's gieat second volume "which Mr. 

 Hudson so well knows how to write. T. D. P. 



A MATHEMATICAL MISCELLANY. 

 Mathi'inaiiqiies et Mathcmaticiens, Pensces et Curiositcs. 

 By A. Rebii're. Second edition. First edition, 1889. 

 (Paris: Nony et Cie, 1893.) 



THIS work, originally issued in 1889, contains 

 quotations from various writers on the study or 

 philosophy of mathematics, together with some anecdotes 

 and problems on the subject. The first edition consisted 

 of but 280 pages, but advantage has been taken of a new 

 issue to make additions which have more than doubled 

 its size. Save for a brief section on the history of mathe- 

 matics, the work is almost entirely a compilation, ardno 

 attempt is made to connect together the extracts or draw 

 any inferences therefrom. The reader thus has the ad- 

 vantage of being able to begin anywhere, but the effect of 

 many hundreds of short and disconnected paragraphs is 

 somewhat jerky. To form such a miscellaneous col-, 

 lection, drawn from writers of all ages, must have involved 

 extensive preparation and years of reading. M. Rebisi.e 

 maybe congratulated on the result of his labours, for 

 the volume is undoubtedly interesting, though of some- 

 what unequal merit. 



It is divided into four parts. The first is mainly 

 devoted to remarks on the philosophy of mathematics — 

 by far thj greater portion being drawn from French 

 sources. In our opinion this is the best section of the. 

 book, since many of the extracts here given would ether 

 wise be practically inaccessible ; moreover it is alA^ays 

 instructive to read the opinio.is of writers like Condillac, 

 Mdme. de Stael, Rousseau, and Comte, and not the less, 

 so when their knowledge of the subject discussed is rather 

 superficial. At the same time we think that a reader may 

 reasonably expect detailed references to the sources ofj 

 the quotations, and certainly the value of the collection 

 would be increased thereby. 



The section on the history of mathematics, which is 

 placed at the closs of this part, is a mere travesty of the. 

 subject. We cannot suppose that M.Rebicre, when writing^ 

 his work, seriously thought that Galileo, Kepler, Newton, 

 and Leibnitz were the only mathematicians outside France 

 who should be mentioned as having been eminent in the 

 last five hundred years ; that among over forty names 

 given as representing contemporary mathematician^ 

 not a single foreigner should find a place ; or that five 

 French papers were the only current periodicals of any, 

 importance (had not M. Rebicre ever heard of Crellis 

 Journal?). In the second edition the names of Huygens, 

 Euler, Gauss, and Jacobi, together with those of a few 

 European contemporaries are added, but though .M. 

 Rebi6re in his preface specifically calls attention to thesf 

 additions, we consider he would have been better advised 

 to have omitted this section rather than give a sketch 

 which is so unsatisfactory. 



