330 Recent Literature. [October 
Birds ‘Through an Opera Glass.*—This little volume of some 223 pages 
is made up of sixty chapters, each of which relates to a single bird. Most 
of the species are the more conspicuous or interesting of our northern 
birds, the author’s observations having been made either at Northampton, 
Massachusetts, or Locust Grove, New York. Many of the chapters were 
published in the ‘Audubon Magazine’ for 1886- These have been revised 
and largely re-written ; the others now appear for the firsttime. The work 
is illustrated by some good woodcuts taken from Baird, Brewer, and Ridg- 
way’s ‘History of North American Birds.’ There isa preliminary chapter 
entitled, ‘Hints to Observers’, which includes a few simple and excellent 
rules intended for beginners. 
Miss Merriam belongs to that class of observers and writers of which, 
so far as North America is concerned, Thoreau may be said to have been 
the originator, and Burroughs, Torrey, Maurice Thompson, and others, the 
disciples and followers. As with all of these, her field work seems to have 
been instigated and directed by an innate love of the woods and fields, and 
an interest, at once strong and affectionate, in their feathered inhabitants. 
Her sole weapon has been not a gun, but an opera glass; her object not 
the acquisition of specimens, but the study of the manners and habits of 
the living birds. Evidently she is particularly interested in their songs 
and call notes, for these receive marked attention in all her biographies. 
Her descriptions of them are perhaps as successful as those of most writers 
in this field, but it may well be doubted if it is really worth while to at- 
tempt anything definite of this kind. Either difterent ears hear differently, 
or, as is more probable, most bird notes are impossible of adequate ren- 
dering into words. 
As an observer, Miss Merriam is unmistakably keen, discriminating, 
and accurate; as a writer, always simple and true, at times highly vigor- 
ous and original. Her attractive little book may be cordially recommended 
to all who wish to study our familiar birds, either with or without an 
opera glass.—W. B. 
Stone’s Catalogue of the Muscicapide in the Collection of the Phila- 
delphia Academy of Natural Sciences.t— Mr. Witmer Stone, a promising 
young ornithologist of Philadelphia, already well known to the readers of 
‘The Auk,’ presents us in the present paper a catalogue of the Muscicapide, 
or Old World Flycatchers, contained in the Museum of the Academy of 
Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. This collection, as is well known, is 
rich in types, containing as it does Gould’s types of his ‘Birds of Aus- 
tralia,’ and most of the types of the species described by Cassin, and 
much historic material from the collections of Gen. Massena, the Duke of 
Rivoli, Prince d’Esling, and Du Chaillu. Since the death of the late 
* Birds | Through an Opera Glass | by Florence A. Merriam | Boston and New York 
| Houghton, Mifflin & Company | The Riverside Press, Cambridge | 1889. 
+ Catalogue of the Muscicapidze in the Collection of the Philadelphia Academy of 
Natural Sciences, By Witmer Stone, Proc, Acad, Nat, Sci. Phila., 1889, pp. 146s 
154, 
