Book Notice. 
337 
have not heard it again. On mentioning the matter to the lady 
at Thorpe who was favoured in 1902, I was told by her that she, 
too, had, about the same date, heard what certainly seemed 
to her, to be the Nightingale, but that she had not liked to say 
anything about it on account of the time of the year and of her 
being thought to be mistaken. The weather, however, it may 
be observed, was more summerlike than any we have had since. 
The Curlew, which used to be so shy, has became wonder- 
fully tame of late years. It has nested regularly at the moor 
edge on one of the farms of this estate (though owing to health 
I cannot speak as to last year), and became quite a companion 
in these parts, flying round and round close at hand uttering 
its cry. 
A Semi-feral Parakeet.—A female Parakeet belonging 
to my gardener has been living out in the woods and shrubberies 
for three years. It comes to his cottage regularly to be fed, 
except during the nesting time, when it is absent for many 
weeks together. In appears to make its nest somewhere in the 
heart of the oak woods, not less than half-a-mile away, but 
exactly where no one has been able to discover. To reach 
these woods it crosses about three-eighths of a mile of open 
ground. There was also a male bird with it, but this perished 
in the first winter that it was out. 
SS 
‘Grouse Disease,’ what it is and how it spreads, with suggestions for 
stamping out disease, and the gradual improvement of moors, by the Rev. 
E. A. Woodruffe-Peacock. Louth: Goulding & Son, 1907. 111 pp. Price 
5/. In this, No. 10 of his ‘Rural Studies Series,’ the Vicar of Cadney 
brings together all that he knows of the Grouse Disease. In his ‘ Fore- 
word’ the author states, ‘So far as they go, these notes are my own, 
7.e., no other person is in any way responsible for them . . . I have never 
done any field observation for the Grouse Commission, or had a specimen 
of theirs through my hands . . . who their advisers are I do not even know, 
as I have never been before them, or received any communication about 
their methods. . . . always understood I was appointed field observer 
to them as an honour for work done in the past; but to show that this 
study has no connection whatever with the Commission's special line of 
enquiry, I have resigned the honorary post they conferred upon me.’ 
Having thus washed his hands of the Grouse Commission, and notwith- 
standing his opening remarks, Mr. Peacock declines to accept credit for 
any originality in his notes, and believes that if a file of ‘The Field’ * were 
carefully sought through, the notes I have brought together here from the 
lips and letters of many men, and ephemeral literature, would be found to 
have been put on record over and over again during the past fifty years by 
practical sportsmen and field observers.’ Having thus a clear statement of 
the nature of the present contribution to this subject, and having noticed 
that from the quotation on the title page, ‘The worst enemies of the human 
race—ignorance and superstition—can only be vanquished by truth and 
reason,’ we can only hope that we have truth and reason from the soil, 
grass, and game specialist of Cadney, Lincs. 
1907 October rt. 
