218 



DISCOVKMY 



which Mr. .MmitKomcry oiithncs, identify " hcbona " with 

 " ebony " and the " yew " respectively. 



In this short panipiilct Mr. Montgomery has collected a 

 rich and interesting array of data, chiefly from medical and 

 other writings of the sixteenth century throughout Europe, 

 to add confirmatory evidence to his own theory developed 

 in the Mod. Lang. Review (July 1920) that " Hebona . . . 

 is a synonym for Lignum vilai or pockwood, as it was often 

 called in the sixteenth century, owing to its frequent use 

 in medicine as a remedy against ' French pocks,' leprosy, 

 and other skin diseases." 



Amongst a meiss of evidence is included a passage from 

 the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, typical for its 

 naive bravado, in which that great Italian sculptor and 

 metal-worker of the Renaissance narrates how he took 

 Lignum vitcB against the orders of his physicians, who 

 told him that it would kill him in a week, and how he dumb- 

 founded them all by making a complete recovery. 



Mr. Montgomery's new interpretation of "hebona" is as 

 strongly supported a one as any that have appeared 



E. L. 



Life of Alfred Newton. By A. F. R. Wollaston. 



With a Preface by Sir Archibald Geikie, O.M. 



(John Murray, i8s.) 



This is a " life " that will appeal to naturalists, an 



appreciative record of a rare, delightful, and uncommon 



personality, one who exercised a great influence at his 



university on the present generation of zoologists. It is 



a revelation that strikes the reader as true to life. 



The life of a scientist at one of our great universities is 

 usually a happy one. He has a useful life's work, security 

 of tenure, money enough, and considerable leisure. He 

 is his own master ; he may spend his holida\'s doing his 

 research or in travel. If he likes to go fishing or shooting, 

 to wTite skits or practise verse, there is no one to stop him. 

 What work he has to do interests him. He is really paid 

 for doing what he likes best to do. He is a man of acknow- 

 ledged position. He has many correspondents and many 

 outside interests. There are the scientific journals 

 occasionally to be contributed to, and a book on the stocks 

 that some fine day will appear and help matters along. 

 He has daily meetings with men who cannot fail to help 

 him in his work, and the stimulus from contact with the 

 keen and ever-growing body of students of the younger 

 generation. On Thursdays he can usuaUy get up to the 

 meetings of the Royal Society; and there meet his con- 

 temporaries. In September there is the British Associa- 

 tion . . . and there is always the fresh air. 



Professor Newton had a love of nature, and especially 

 of birds, that was life-long. An unfortunate accident 

 crippled him as a boy, and in manhood a second accident 

 compelled liim to use permanently two sticks in getting 

 about. This did not prevent his travelling often and 

 widely, but it must have been a serious handicap to one 

 in whose category of good things birds occupied the place 

 assigned to horses and dogs in that of the stranger with the 

 tall white hat and the squint whom David Copperfield 

 met on the Canterbury coach. It accounts in some 

 measure also for his very conservative habits. He went up 



to Magdalene ( iillcgc, Cambridge, as an undergraduate 

 of nineteen in i8.)8, and six years later was elected to the 

 Norfolk Travelling Fellowship in Zookjgy. which enabled 

 him to travel to Lapland, Iceland, and elsewhere, to study 

 birds. His early researches laid the foundation of liis fame 

 as one of the greatest ornithologists of the day, and in 

 1886 he was elected to the professorship of Comparative 

 Anatomy at Cambridge, a post he occupied till his death 

 in 1907. 



This book has been written by one of Professor Newton's 

 students, at the moment of \vriting in Spitsbergen on an 

 expedition, and himself a distinguished zoologist. He has 

 given us a very readable volume. From personal know- 

 ledge and by selections from the many letters written 

 to and by Newton, he has described very clearly the princi- 

 pal events in his life, his opinions and his characteristics. 

 Sir A. E. Shipley contributes an admirable chapter of 

 reminiscences, Mr. F. H. H. Guillemard a few pages, and 

 one of Newton's oldest friends. Sir Archibald Geikie, the 

 preface. 



Newton was a naturalist from his youth up. There was 

 talk at one time of his going into the Church, but orni- 

 thology claimed him. He was never happier than when 

 observing or talking about birds, while his feeling about 

 Orders (though he was a genuinely religious man) was that 

 the nearer he got to them the less he liked their look. In 

 addition to keeping up a lively correspondence with such 

 naturalists as Canon Tristram, Kingsley, and Darwin 

 (some of wliich is reproduced in this book), and contribut- 

 ing many papers to the scientific journals, he published 

 three works, the best known of which is the Dictionary of 

 Birds. He was one of the earliest naturalists in this 

 country to accept Darwin's explanation of the origin of 

 species, and did good work in attempting the herculean 

 task of making that explanation more acceptable by his 

 brethren. In many ways, however, he was old-fasliioned 

 and a slave to fLxed ideas. Like Mr. Crisparkle's mother, 

 as Dr. Shipley puts it, he was always " open to discussion," 

 but he invariably looked as though he would like to see 

 the discussion that would change his mind. He hated 

 changes of all sorts as one should the des-il, and both on 

 scientific matters and on little points about which an 

 ordinary man would not worry his head he was extra- 

 ordinarily conservative. He was, indeed, a mixture of the 

 crusty old bachelor don and the good, old-fashioned, mid- 

 Victorian country gentleman, a race to which by birth he 

 belonged ; a man of strongly-marked personaUty, generous 

 and kindly at times, calm and very able, in all he did 

 painstaking and accurate, yet with a singular lack of sym- 

 pathy with men and tilings from whom and which he found 

 occasion to differ. He hated the Radicals, and in liis cata- 

 logue of aversions were hymns, cats, motor-cars, and the 

 Cambridge trams. He regarded much of the newer work 

 in his own subject as new-fangled, and so averse was he 

 to systems of classifications that in the compilation of his 

 dictionary he fell back upon the alphabetical system. 

 Being accurate himself because he strove to be so, he dis- 

 liked inaccuracy in others. Consequently he often came 

 down like a hammer on men whose work one would ordin- 

 arily allow to pass. For example, he thought there was 



