Vol. XII. 



1912 



] From Magazines, &c, K^ 



such a condition exists in Venezuela. The story is absolutely 

 without foundation, in my opinion, and has simply been put 

 forward for commercial purposes. The natives of the country, 

 who do virtually all of the hunting for feathers, are not provident 

 in their nature, and their practices are of a most cruel and brutal 

 nature. I have seen them frequently pull the plumes from 

 wounded birds, leaving the crippled birds to die of starvation, 

 unable to respond to the cries of their young in the nests above, 

 which were calling for food. I have known these people to tie 

 and prop up wounded Egrets on the marsh, where they would 

 attract the attention of other birds Ifying by. These decoys they 

 keep in this position until they die of their wounds or from the 

 attacks of insects. I have seen the terrible red ants of that 

 country actually eating out the eyes of these wounded^ helpless 

 birds that were tied up by the plume-hunters. I could write you 

 many pages of the horrors practised in gathering aigrette feathers 

 in Venezuela by the natives for the millinery trade of Paris and 

 New York." 



Reviews. 



["The Flight of Birds." By F. W. Headley, M.B.O.U. Witherby and 

 Co., London. Price, 5s. net.] 



Works on aerial navigation and the flight of birds are usually 

 too technical to appeal to the average reader, but Mr. Headley, 

 in this compact little volume, has endeavoured to avoid the use 

 of technical terms, and as a result his views are intelligible to 

 those who are not mathematicians. The author dealt at length 

 with the subject of bird flight in his valuable " Structure and 

 Life of Birds" and the more popular book entitled "Life and 

 Evolution." Necessarily he covers, in his latest volume, much 

 the same ground, and several of the illustrations in " Life and 

 Evolution " are reproduced ; but every page of " The Flight of 

 Birds " is worthy of careful perusal by those ornithologists whose 

 interests are not confined to the mere collecting of specimens and 

 field observations. The chapters deal at length with such subjects 

 as gliding, stability, motive power, steering, pace, and last, the 

 machinery of flight, and so forth. It is impossible to even outline 

 the author's views in the limits of a review, but the following 

 extract from the chapter on stability is of special interest : — 

 " What we see in the flight of birds — I am not now speaking of 

 soaring — is not a steady, careful maintenance of equilibrium, but 

 an instantaneous recovery of balance whenever it is lost. The 

 bird can afford to be indifferent to the difficult problems which 

 this subject presents. . . . However the gusts and vagaries 

 of the wind may upset him, he can right himself at once. He owes 

 his wonderful stability to some extent to his fine build and the 

 elasticity of his feathers, but mainly to manoeuvres and adjust- 

 ments that cannot be mere reflexes. The flying machine which 



