The Zoologist— June, 1868. 1243 



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



' Tlie Birds of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire : a Contribution to 

 the Natural History of the two Counties' By Alexander 

 W. M. CLARK-KENNEDY,-an Eton Boy. Post 8vo. 232 pp. text; 

 four coloured photographic plates. Eton : Ingalton aud Drake. 

 London : Simpkin, Marshall and Co. 1868. 



Counties are arbitrary divisions of the kingdom for political, 

 ecclesiastical or other purposes, and are made without any reference 

 to physical or natural conditions : when, therefore, we enumerate and 

 classify the living inhabitants of a county, we know that we are on 

 very artificial, and therefore treacherous ground. Nevertheless, the 

 thorough and exhaustive examination of each county may eventually 

 supply us with valuable materials for a fauna of the little island on 

 which we live. Taking certain of the larger sucklers, as the wild cattle 

 of Chillingham, the red deer and the roebuck, we find their range 

 defined with the same clearness, accuracy and constancy as a river is 

 marked on our maps. It is somewhat different with birds, because 

 they are volatile ; the eagle that may soar over London once in his 

 life is no more a bird of Middlesex, on that ground, than I am a 

 Frenchman because I have performed the linen-draper's tour to Paris 

 and back. Still a very considerable interest attaches to the clear 

 definition of the boundaries within which birds, whether resident or 

 migratory, confine themselves, and of the periods at which they 

 appear: thus the wheatear, one of our earliest arrivals, makes its. 

 appearance simultaneously all over the kingdom; after the most 

 minute inquiry I fail to establish any marked discrepancy of time 

 between its advent in Cornwall, Cork, the Giant's Causeway, the 

 Welch mountains, Midlothian and the Shetland Islands : then, again, 

 in one locality it appears to be a bird of the sea-beach, in another an 

 alpine climber, in a third a bird of the fallows. How different it is 

 with a later arrival, the nightingale; it is never heard in Cornwall, 

 Wales, Ireland or Scotland ; rarely in Devonshire, a county apparently 

 particularly adapted to its habits; nor yet in Ireland, whence it was 

 perhaps banished by St. Patrick simultaneously with the snakes : it 

 swarms in Kent, Sussex and Surrey, is common in the eastern counties, 

 and permeates sparingly the midland, north-eastern and northern 

 counties. How different, again, the cuckoo, which is a still later 

 arrival, but is diffused at once over the kingdom, loving woods where 



