NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 79 
Duck, have also been recognized. However, none of these possess 
much interest except the Pelican, the discovery of which was 
altogether unexpected. Only two bones of it have been recog- 
nized,* and, curiously enough, each of them is a humerus from 
the same side of the bird! M. Alphonse Milne-Edwards has 
shown that one of them, though of large size, was that of a young 
bird; hence it may not be unfairly inferred that the species bred 
in the district. Mr. Skertchly includes the Water Tortoise, but 
the only remains known to have been found in England were not 
discovered actually within the limits of the Fens, though in truth 
not many miles away. 
In his account of the modern fauna, the writer, whom we take 
to be Mr. Miller, hardly rises to his interesting subject. Con- 
cerning its earlier condition we have already said enough in 
quoting and remarking on the extracts above given. In the list 
of existing mammals (pp. 858—362) we find a few statements that 
seem to be strange; for instance, Mr. Jenyns’s Plecotus brevimanus 
was not “supposed by the author to be a variety of” P. auritus, 
but was described by him as a distinct species, though it is now 
generally recognized as the young of the Long-eared Bat. In his 
views as to Shrews, Mr. Miller is strangely at variance with Prof. 
Bell, for in his last edition we find there but three species given 
as British, whereas Mr. Miller will have four for the Fens. Nor 
is the latter happy in his nomenclature, for he calls one of them 
Sorex hibernicus! Had he taken the trouble to refer to Mr. 
Jenyns’s published paper, he would have found this last name to 
have been given to a supposed variety, from Ireland, of Mr. 
Jenyns’s S. rusticus, which is a Fen animal, no doubt, but has 
been identified in Mr. Bell’s last edition (p. 148 a) with S. pygmeus. 
In the same work Mr. Bell united S. remifer with S. fodiens, and 
there can be little doubt that he was right in so doing; thus 
Mr. Miller’s fourth species of Fen Shrew comes to nothing.t 
* Proc. Zool. Soc., 1868, p. 2; 1871, p. 702. 
+ In mentioning the British Shrews we cannot refrain from expressing our 
regret that Prof. Bell, or, as we suppose, Mr. Tomes, who assisted him in the 
Insectivora, has given up the old name of Sorex araneus for the common Shrew, in 
favour of S. vulgaris. The latter was bestowed by Linnzus in 1754, and he, in 1766,— 
the date from which all binomial nomenclature in Zoology starts,—replaced it by the 
far better known araneus. No doubt some foreign naturalists have applied this 
specific designation to a perfectly distinct species, but their misuse does not invalidate 
the proper use of it by Linnzus. 
