NA JURE 



589 



THURSUAV, OCTOBER 17, 1S95. 



RECENT ORNITHOLOGY. 



The Laud Birds in and around S/.-Andreii-'s. By George 



Bruce. (Dundee : John Leng, 1895.) 

 T/ic- Migration of Brilisii Birds, including t/teir Post- 

 Giacial Emigration, as Traced by the Application of a 

 Nc'<i.' Laic of Dispersal. By Charles Uixon. (London: 

 Chapman and Hall, 1895.) 

 Heligoland as an Ornithological Observatory, the Re- 

 sult of Fifty Years' E.xpcriencc. By Heinrich Gatke. 

 Translated by Rudolph Rosenstock, M.A. Oxon. (Edin- 

 burgh : Uavid Douglas, 1895.) 

 A Hand-book to the Game Birds. By W. R Ogihie- 

 Grant. \'ol. i. Sand-grouse, Partridges, Pheasants. 

 (London : Allen and Co., 1895.) 

 The Land-birds and Game-birds of Netc England, 'lUith 

 Descriptions of the Birds, their Nests and Eggs, their 

 Habits and N^otes. By H. D. Minot. With illus- 

 trations. Second edition. Edited by William Brewster. 

 (New N'ork : Houghton and Co., 1895. j 

 Wild England of To-day, and the Wild Life in it. By 



C. J. Cornish. 'London : Seeley and Co., 1895.) 

 The Pheasant : Natural History. B\- the Re\-. H. A. 

 Macpherson. Shooting. By .A. J. Stuart-Wortley. 

 Cooking. By Alexander Innes Shand. ( The Fur and 

 Feather Series.) (London : Longmans, Green, and Co., 

 1895.) 

 "\J O section of vertebrate zoology has in this country 

 -^ ' attracted more amateur disciples than ornithology; 

 and the literature of perhaps no other group has been 

 burdened by so many useless contributions by writers who, 

 possessing not only little literary ciualification for the task, 

 Ijul a veiy superficial knowledge of the subject, rush into 

 print, assuming that, because they are able to see, they are 

 capable of observing, which are two very^ difilerent things. 

 .\mong the number of such contributions must be included 

 A volume of 563 closely-printed octavo pages on "The 

 Land Birds about St. .Andrews," by Mr. (ieorge Bruce. 

 On the book opening of its own accord at p. 44, the 

 licading of " The Griffon \'ulture " caught the eye and 

 surprised us not a little ; for the addition of this majestic 

 bird to the a\ ifauna of Fifeshire was quite new to us. On 

 consulting the title-page, however, we discovered that the 

 work was of wider scope than indicated on the cover, 

 and included " a condensed history of the British land 

 Ijirds, with extracts from the poets and observations and 

 mecdotes on natural history.' " The single occurrence of 

 .1 solitary specimen'' in Ireland, recorded Ijy Varrcll, is 

 apparently sufficient ex':use for this page of padding. A 

 ■ arefull) -written account of the birds of Fifeshire would 

 have been welcomed to our lists of local faunas; but with 

 so many excellent histories of British birds in existence 

 such as that by Mr. Howard Saunders, to mention only 

 one), there was hardly a call, one would have thought, for 

 uiolher, except it were commended by some special 

 feature or no\el method of treatment. The special features 

 of this book appear to consist in the superabundant ex- 

 tracts from the poets — more or less, generally \^a,dpropos 

 — cuttings from the local newspapers, and quotations from 

 NO. 1355, VOL. 52] 



many other sources equally authoritative. Although the- 

 " history," such as it is, is very condensed, and not always 

 to be taken on trust, and the anecdotes poor and point- 

 less, there are, ne\ertheless, in the book not a few 

 observations which we are confident will pro\e new to 

 most ornithologists. Of these we cull a few, and refer our 

 readers, who desire to dig deeper, to the book itself 

 for others. 



" The Isle of Man has proved one of the best stations 

 in Scotland for migration observations." 



" The species means every individual bird in creation : 

 for instance, a lark is one species. . . . .\ genus is a group 

 of these birds so closely resembling each other as hardly 

 to be mistaken, as the raven, the carrion crow. . . . These 

 combined form the genus called Cori'us, which means in. 

 British [t/V] crow. The plural of Cor^'us is Cori'ince, as 

 genera is the plural of genus." 



". Among those naturalists who have recently [!] done- 

 so much for the advancement of this branch of science 

 Temnick [1] and Montague [!] deserve to be ranked. 

 amongst the first." 



Mr. Bruce records the occurrence of the nightingale as 

 far north in Scotland as Paisley and Uddingston, upon the 

 unquestioned authority of one James .-Xndcrson in a 

 letter to a local newspaper, apparenth-. The Slruthionidic,. 

 we find here, are represented in the British Isles by the 

 genus Otis, and that the author of the species i'lut'' 

 stridula, Stdic/tria arundinacea, a.nd .^'. phragmites is .Mr. 

 George Bruce, of St. Andrews 1 According to the title- 

 page he is also the author of " Destiny and other Poems, ' 

 of which we must confess our ignorance. W't trust, 

 however, that the doom of " The Land Birds of St. 

 Andrews" may have no prejudicial effect on his earlier 

 volume. 



"The Migration of British Birds" is the new work by Mr. 

 Charles Di.xon, which was heralded a short time ago by an 

 article in the Fortnightly Re^'ieiij from his ow n pen. This 

 author's previous volume on a similar subject was ex- 

 haustively discussed in N.\ture for December 1892. On 

 that occasion the deliberate conclusion was expressed 

 " that Mr. Dixon, author of so many works as he may be, 

 is no authority on the subject of migration, which he has 

 left exactly as he found it." The same verdict must be 

 passed on the present volume, and we might have dis- 

 missed it without further discussion but for two reasons. 

 The first is the fact that in one or two important daily 

 journals, whose scientific reviews in general command 

 our entire respect, Mr. Di.xon has been rather pre- 

 maturely ele\ated to the rank of a Moses in omitholog)-, 

 and the other is that he declares that his present \-iews 

 are now opposed to those he has expressed in previous 

 works. Whether the abandonment by Mr. Dixon of his 

 former views is due to the criticism to which they were 

 subjected in N.xtl'RE, we have not the satisfaction of 

 being informed. 



This " new Law " here promulgated to the « orld- 

 not yet accepted by it — is the " undiscovered principle " 

 which is to solve all the difficulties of geographical dis- 

 tribution, and the dispersal of life, and clear up " the 

 greatest mystery which the whole animal kingdom pre- 

 sents," to quote the words of one of our foremost ornitho- 

 logists — "a mystery which attracted the earliest writers, 

 and can in its chief point be no niore explained by the 



