Tur ZooLocist—SepremsBeEr, 1876. 5063 
lotices of New Books, 
The Birds of the North-West: a Handbook of the Ornithology 
of the Region drained by the Missouri River and its Tribu- 
taries. By Extior Cougs, Captain and Assistant-Surgeon 
United States Army. Demy 8vo, 791 pp. 1874. 
(Srconp Nortcz.) 
To students of English Ornithology the American Ornis 
possesses an additional interest from the fact that the greater 
number of the accidental visitants in our bird-list are to be traced 
to the American Continent. It has been even asserted that when’ 
there are European and American types of the same bird, it is the 
latter which are generally met with in England. Thus it is the 
American and not the European form of the hawk-owl which has 
been obtained in this country. As a rule American birds are 
darker in plumage than the corresponding European types. There 
are few of the numerous sandpipers, tattlers, and stints of the 
American list, representatives of which have not crossed over 
to our shores; and to the English collector these birds are a 
specially interesting group. They are suggestive of wild and 
desolate shores; of moor and marsh; of those secluded scenes 
where birds are to be met with in greatest variety, and where the 
shyest of them can alone be studied. The route by which these 
Americans probably reach our coast is by British America, 
Northern Russia, and Greenland. But against this is to be set 
the fact that our visitants from America have never been observed 
in Greenland, while very many of them have never been procured 
in any part of Europe except the British Isles. From this it 
would appear that, after all, the direct ocean route may be the one 
by which most of these strangers come to us.* Not all who wander 
to such a distance meet with the fate of finding their way to a 
collector’s cabinet. Some few, certainly, must escape the gunner’s 
notice, and it is an interesting subject for speculation whether 
these lost ones ever return to their familiar homes, or whether they 
go on in their wanderings until they reach some climate so uncon- 
genial to them that they must finally perish? There is hardly 
* Vide Harting’s ‘ Handbook,’ Introduction, p. xi, 
