5Q 



NA TURE 



[November 16, 1905 



scendants of a world in which, owing to a decrease 

 in temperature below the freezing point of water, that 

 useful liquid will be replaced by alcohol ! 



There is a Scots proverb running thus : — " Mickle 

 cry and little 'oo (wool)." The amount of "wool" 

 in this work is surely insufficient for the " cry." Yet 

 there are some suggestive passages, and the author 

 has evidently spent much time over his problem. 



A word in conclusion as to the " get-up " of the 

 book. The reviewer, in reading it, felt that he must 

 act as a proof-reader. There is hardly a page on 

 which a misprint does not occur; and such lapses as 

 "The only data available is the following: "; the 

 words uni- and tetra-valent in one line; "to com- 

 pletly (sic) picture "; and the printing of almost every 

 sentence as a paragraph, make the reader's task an 

 ungrateful one. 



Something, no doubt, may be accomplished in 

 course of time when affinity constants have been 

 numerically determined (and many are already 

 known) to show that they, too, are periodic functions 

 of the atomic weights ; but Mr. Martin has not 

 sui ceeded in pointing out the lines on which this goal 

 is to be reached. 



AN ORNITHOLOGIST'S JOURNALS. 

 Travels of a Naturalist in Northern Europe: Norway, 

 1S-1, Archangel, 1872, Petchora, 1S75. B . v J- A - 

 Harvie-Brown. 2 vols. Pp. xxii + 541; with 

 coloured plates and other illustrations and 4 maps. 

 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.) Price 3!. 3s. 

 net. 



THE journals which compose the greater part of 

 these two handsome volumes relate to three 

 ornithological visits paid to Norway, Archangel, and 

 Petchora about a quarter "I a century ago, and the 

 author good-humouredly anticipates their being re- 

 garded as " stale news " or " cauld kail het again." 

 On this score, however, there was no need for an 

 apology, For the author tells his stor} for the first 

 time (aparl from previous technical reports), and, 

 besides, the interest of a naturalist's observations 

 depends, not on their date (provided the date be given), 

 but on their intrinsic worth. 



As Mr. Harvie-Brown is an accomplished ornith- 

 ologist, an enthusiastic faunist, and the author of 

 some delightful and valuable books on the natural 

 history of Scotland, it goes without saying that these 

 journals contain some interesting scientific inform- 

 ation and sume picturesque narrative. But the 

 trouble is th.it in discover these u.ises we have to 

 traverse what seem to us dreary deserts of trivial and 

 commonplace monotony, and we can hardly control 

 our impatience by remembering that there had to be 

 many trivial and commonplace days before the author 

 found the nesting-ground of the little stint. What 

 is published is just what was written down at the 

 close of each day, and it follows that items which 

 loomed large at the moment, such as the supper 

 menu, appear of little importance to the callous 

 reader, as doubtless to the journalist himself in re- 

 trospect at Dunipace. He got such a gorgeous 

 NO. I 88 I, VOL. JT,~] 



"bag" of birds — 1019 skins and 1021 eggs from the 

 Petchora hunt alone — that we can sympathise with, 

 his wish to live his hunting days on the tundra over 

 again ; we only wish that his recapitulation had not 

 been so terribly in extenso. We are much interested 

 to read how Mr. Seebohm came in one evening, " and 

 with a triumphant thump laid on the table, first a 

 Grey Plover, then a Snow Bunting, and then a 

 Curlew Sandpiper; lastly, and most triumphantly — 

 hurrah! — five Little Stints, long looked for, found at 

 last"; but we cannot get up much enthusiasm over 

 the bulk of the narrative. 



The tour in Norway was more or less of a novelty 

 in 1871, and much is related that is now familiar. 

 Much has changed, but more remains the same, and 

 ■ me unchanging feature of which the journal affords 

 abundant illustration is the human appetite. 



The Archangel region had been but little worked 

 by ornithologists when Mr. Harvie-Brown and (the 

 late) Mr. E. R. Alston explored there in 1S72, and 

 they were richly rewarded. The journal becomes 

 more interesting, though our attention is still dis- 

 tracted by Ernst Craemers's toothache, by the size 

 of the packing-case lor the birds, by Alston's loss of 

 his big knife (" one made by Wilkinson, of 

 London "), by the number of bowls of milk drunk, 

 and so forth. 



The most adventurous journey was that which Mr. 

 Harvie-Brown and Mr. Seebohm took in 1875 to the 

 region of the Petchora, where they were the first to 

 find the eggs of the little stint in Europe. The 

 author shows his powers in the graphic description 

 of the locality and in his story of the discovery. We 

 quote the description of the nest : — 



" Rather untidy, rather rough and uneven round 

 its rim, very shallow, sparingly lined with dry grasses 

 and a little leaf or two, which may have been plucked 

 by the bird as she sat in her nest. Round it, deep, 

 spongy, but not wet, yellow moss, the dark green 

 leaves and empty calices of the Arctic Bramble, a 

 tuft of round-stemmed green sedge with seed ; a little 

 further off, the now flowerless plants of the sweet- 

 scented dwarf rhododendron, and bunches and patches 

 ol long white grass and plants of a small cotton- 

 grass, and other plants and grasses, of which we 

 shall bring home specimens for identification." 



There is a fine plate of stint's eggs, and a careful 

 comparison of the little stint and Temminck's stint. 

 Another beautiful plate contrasts the eggs of grey 

 plover and golden plover. 



In the course of the Petchora journal we find some 

 notes on habits which arc interesting, e.g. those 

 relating to the fact that birds which do not perch, or 

 but rarely perch, in other countries, perch in Pet- 

 chora. Thus, on one occasion, by patiently follow- 

 ing up the " tick tjuck " of the common snipe, Mr. 

 Harvie-Brown had the satisfaction of seeing this 

 wader " perched on the tip-top of one of the gaunt 

 branchless blasted larches, quite 70 feet from the 

 ground." Curlews, gulls, snow-buntings, &c, were 

 also seen perching. 



" It is, we think, undoubtedly forced upon them 

 by the great flooding of the country, and what was 

 originally forced upon them has become a favourite 

 habit." 



