BOOK REVIEWS 

 The Bird: Its Form and Function. By C. William Beebe. New 

 York: Holt. 1906. Pp. 490. $3.50. 



In the preface Mr. Beebe says: **I have intended the book more as an 

 invitation than aught else." It can but have that effect upon the most casual 

 reader for the author has certainly accomplished his aim: **To take a few 

 dead facts and clothe them with the living interest which will make them 

 memorable and full of meaning to any lover of birds, and at the same time 

 to keep them acceptable in tenor and truth to the most critical scientist." 

 Mr. Beebe says that he has lectured to audiences of teachers every one of 

 whom was able to identify fifty birds or more, but not one of them knew the 

 significance of the scales on a bird's foot. It is this gap that the book 

 bridges by an untechnical study of the bird in the abstract. 



The illustrations are unusually good, numerous and varied. The paper 

 is of excellent quality and the type large and clear. Evolution with its var- 

 ious problems such as those of sexual coloration is well treated; and senti- 

 mental personification has been avoided. Interesting — because unusual or 

 unexpected or because suggestive of deeper significance —are all the chapters 

 of this much-needed book. The author gains the confidence of his readers 

 by not attempting to explain everything positively and by frankly including 

 striking and as yet unexplained exceptions to the laws formulated. Points of 

 unusual interest which are well presented are the head and eye difference 

 between the pursued and the pursuer; albinism as related to excessive increase 

 in numbers; the method of making bird sounds (vocal cords being absent in 

 birds); the position and control of the air-sacs and the strikingly small size 

 of the lungs proper; the various causes of color in feathers (pigment in black, 

 red, brown and yellow feathers; miniature prisms in the iridescent colors; 

 and a combination of pigment with innumerable overlying prisms, as in blue 

 feathers which contain only brown or yellowish pigment; and other feathers 

 white because of the innumerable air spaces in them); the peculiar develop- 

 ment of the hyoid bone making possible the projectile tongue of the wood- 

 pecker; the third or pineal eye and its relation to the soft spot in a baby's 

 head; and the structural likenesses to the reptiles, found in such structures as 

 the occasional bifed tongue, the similar mechanism of color, the scaled feed, 

 the clawed wings and the transition from scales to hair and feathers. 



J. B. 



