402 
NATORE 
| March 
4 
23; 
1871 


qualified than that of the recently-appointed kecper of | 
the’ botanical department of the British Museum. 
In this London Botanical Museum would be also 
appropriately placed various pre-Linnean and other bo- 
tanical collections, having only a historical or other 
adventitious interest, but there would be little use in 
attempting there anything corresponding with the Museum 
of Economic Botany, which has acquired so much im- 
portance, and is so well placed at Kew. That could only 
come into competition with the economic collections at 
South Kensington, but all prejudicial collision between 
the two is clearly avoided, and each one will increase its 
own practical utility by strictly adhering to the rule that 
at Kew the products are arranged according to the plants 
they are derived from; at South Kensington, according 
to the uses they are put to. 


POPULAR ORNITHOLOGY 
Cassell’s Book of Birds. Translated and adapted from 
the text of the eminent German Naturalist, Dr. Brehm, 
by Thomas Rymer Jones, F.R.S., Professor of Natural 
History and Comparative Anatomy in King’s College, 
London. 400 woodcuts and coloured plates. Parts I. 
—XIV. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.) 
ERSONS wishing to be misinformed on the subject of 
Ornithology should obtain and read the “ Book of 
Birds” now in course of publication by Messrs. Cassell, 
Petter, and Galpin, and recommended by them to 
“everyone who wishes to know all that is known about 
birds.” The advertisement whence these words are quoted 
also tells us that the work, when completed, is to contain 
“upwards of 400 engravings, embracing every species of 
birds known to exist ;” but as on a moderate computation 
some 12,000 species of birds have been described, it is 
pretty clear that to fulfil that promise each engraving 
should represent 30 species or thereabouts. The most 
cursory inspection of the portion published (and we have 
the fourteenth part lying before us) will show that nothing 
of the kind has been done, and that many groups are left 
without an illustration at all. 
Furthermore, the work is announced as “ translated and 
adapted from the text of the eminent German naturalist, 
Dr. Brehm, by Thomas Rymer Jones, F.R.S., Professor 
of Natural History and Comparative Anatomy in King’s 
College, London,” a collection of assertions which we 
take the liberty of questioning. We are aware of the 
recent existence of no fewer than four German naturalists 
of that name, all of them, we believe, entitled to the 
doctorial prefix. Of these four, which is the one whose 
labours are chosen for the exercise of Prof. Jones’s 
industry in translation and ingenuity in adaptation? Tye 
eminent Dr. Brehm ought, of course, to be the answer ; 
but then the most “eminent”—that is the best known 
and most prolific writer of the four—was Dr. Christian 
Ludwig Brehm, who, having attained great notoriety as a 
“splitter” of species, died at an advanced age some half- 
dozen years since, leaving to of his three bedoctored sons 
behind him. Now, Dr. Brehm, the father, among his 
many works certainly never published one which: could be 
‘“‘adapted” to the form of Messrs. Cassell’s “ Book of 
Birds :” nor did Oscar Brehm, the son, who died in his 
father’s lifetime, The question is therefore narrowed to 

the woks of the survivors. Of these Dr. Reinhold 
Brehm has contributed several ornithological papers to 
journals, but none of any great importance, and there is 
no need to accredit him with the authorship of any work 
at all resembling the present. It seems therefore that 
Dr. Alfred Brehm must be in the eyes of the English 
publishers and translator “the eminent Dr. Brehm.” We 
are inclined to believe that the production we are now re- 
viewing is his offspring, whether he deserves to be called 
“the eminent German naturalist” or not, and that it has 
not hitherto been printed, since an examination of his work, 
“Das Leben derVégel,” from which some of the illustrations 
in the present book are taken, fails to show that its text 
furnishes the groundwork for “ Cassell’s Book of Birds.” 
Having thus justified, as we hope, our doubts as to the 
“Book of Birds” originating from “the eminent Dr. 
Brehm,” we must further express our doubts as to Prof. 
Jones being the translator and adaptor of it from the 
German of another naturalist of the same name. Here 
our doubts, it may be thought, do not rest upon so satis- 
factory a base ; but the meritorious work by which Prof. 
Rymer Jones is best known, his “ Outline of the Animal 
Kingdom,” shows that its author is gifted in no common 
degree. The character of Professor Jones’s volume 
was and is caution and accuracy, the character of 
the “Editor's Introduction” to the “ Book of Birds” 
is the reverse. Here is an example. Its writer 
says (p. 17): “In order to render the following ac- 
count of the structure of a bird’s skeleton intelligible to 
the non-scientific reader we have delineated that of the 
Goose,” and a reference is added to “ Fig. 12,” which 
faces these words. Now we scarcely expect that we shall 
be believed, but it is an undoubted fact that there is no 
figure of a Goose’s skeleton at all, and that “Fig. 12” 
represents the skeleton of a bird so entirely different as a 
Pigeon ; while so far from the inference being true that 
the editor has “delineated” the subject for the express 
purpose of enlightening his readers, we must declare that 
the woodcut in question is a very bad enlargement of 
what has been for years a stock-figure in anatomical 
handbooks. We do not pretend to know its origin, but 
we have now before us a far better copy of it in a Swedish 
work,* and it has been repeated in manyother books. That 
‘Prof. Rymer Jones has been guilty of such a blunder, 
to say nothing of sucha swggestzo fa/si as this, we hold to 
be incredible. Again we have close by another woodcut 
| (p. 22), which we are told represents “ A young chicken 
shortly after its escape from the egg.” Now we cannot 
believe that such an explanation was written by Prof. 
Rymer Jones, for he must well know the figure to be that 
of a young Blackbird assuming the first or nestling 
plumage, as it is rightly said to be in the “ Catalogue of 
the Physiological Series ” of the Museum of the College of 
Surgeons, where (vol. ii. Part II. p. 312, pl. xlv. fig. 4), 
the original of the woodcut may be found. Those who 
can believe that Prof. Rymer Jones does not know the dif- 
ference between a Goose’s skeleton and a Pigeon’s, and 
between a Chicken newly hatched and a Blackbird just 
about to leave the nest, may believe it, we unhesitatingly 
declare we do not. 
But it might be urged that all these matters are of little 
* “Grundlinier till Zoologiens Studium,” af Karl Torin. (Stock*olm, 
1870) 3ded. i. p. 87. 
