Notices of Books. 9785 



Notices of New Books. 



'Handbook to the Birds of Australia.'' By John Gould, F.R.S., &c. 

 In Two Volumes, royal 8vo. Published by the Author, at 

 No. 26, Charlotte Street, Bloomsbury. 1865. 



The author and reviewer are both under a disadvantage in the notice 

 of an incomplete work. The author may fairly object to any criticisms 

 that would apply to the work as a whole ; and the reviewer is especially 

 liable to the fallacy of praising or blaming certain peculiarities which 

 would perhaps escape notice when the work was complete. It is desir- 

 able, therefore, to slate that this is but the first volume of a work that 

 proposes to describe all the birds of Australia, and is intended to be a 

 reprint of Mr. Gould's great work on the Birds of Australia, incor- 

 porating all the discoveries which have been made since the completion 

 of that magnificent work, in 1845. The present volume contains 636 

 pages of letter-press, without illustrations, and describes all the birds of 

 prey, thirty-seven in number; and three hundred and fifty-one of the 

 passerine tribes, which are here, after the English fashion, termed 

 Insessores. 



It is almost superfluous to remark that, of all living ornithologists, 

 Mr. Gould is the most competent to accomplish thoroughly this self- 

 imposed task : not only is he familiar with the book and museum phase 

 of his subject, — and to this he has contributed more than any other man, 

 — but he has dwelt among these birds in their Australian homes, has 

 heard their voices, watched theii flight, taken their nests, noted their 

 migrations, sketched their living forms, and made himself in every 

 respect at home with their life-histories; so that, possessing in himself 

 the largest amount of Australian bird-lore that was ever amassed, he is 

 without question the best man to complete a Natural History of our 

 Antipodean Birds. 



There are certain circumstances which render Australia a country of 

 the highest possible zoological interest. Admitting, as we generally do, 

 that the placental animals are the highest in Nature's scale, it is not a 

 little remarkable that from Australia they are almost entirely absent; 

 there are no beasts of prey, no ruminants, no pachyderms ; rodents are 

 represented by a iev! species of rats, and these, with a few bats, constitute 

 the entire placental fauna : but marsupials, that strangely primitive form 

 of sucklers, abound, although fast fading away, and destined shortly to 

 yield their places to the milch kine and sheep of Britain, — yet too unmis- 

 takably registered by Science, ever to be forgotten while the printing- 

 VOL. XXIII. 3 F 



