NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. Lb 
give the best version of the rhymes quoted by him: a single 
instance will suffice. We give Mr. Dyer’s lines first, and append 
the better known version :— 
In April In April 
The Cuckoo shows his bill ; Come he will; 
In May In May 
He is singing all day ; He sings all day ; 
In June In June 
He changes his tune ; He changes his tune; 
In July In July 
He prepares to fly ; He prepares to fly ; 
In August In August 
Fly he must Go he must. 
The lines to the Nightingale (p. 72) beginning 
“ Every thing did banish moan 
Save the Nightingale alone,” 
and referring to the popular notion that the mournful notes of 
this bird are produced by its leaning against a thorn while it 
sings, although attributed by Mr. Dyer, like others before him, 
to Shakespeare, and included in most editions of his poems, were 
written, it is believed, by Richard Barnefield, in 1598, and pub- 
lished by him in a work entitled ‘ Poems in divers Humours. ’* 
When quoting Andrew Boord to the effect that “in the 
Forest of St. Leonards in Southsex there doth never singe 
nightingale ;” that “they wyl singe round about the Foreste and 
never within the precincte of the Forest,’ Mr. Dyer might have 
referred also to “that lake whose gloomy shore Skylark never 
warbles o’er,” 7.¢e., Glendalough in the County Wicklow. There 
are many such legends in which the absence of certain animals 
from particular localities or districts is insisted on, but the 
experience of naturalists has shown that such statements, however 
time-honoured they may be, are not always to be relied on. 
Mr. Dyer has collected some curious superstitions and odd 
notions concerning animals, chiefly in connection with weather- 
prophecy, death-omens, and the ill-luck said to attend the 
killing them, but he has by no means exhausted all that might 
be said on what may be termed “the Folk-lore of Zoology.” 
Under this title some years ago, Mr. E. R. Alston contributed a 
* See Hllis’s ‘ Specimens of the Early English Poets,’ vol. ii., p. 356. 
