Recent Ornitfiblogical Publications. 223 



of the kind made by the boys of any of our Public Schools. 

 We welcome this little list as an earnest of what may be hoped 

 for from the rising generation^ and with the greatest cordiality 

 congratulate its authors on their auspicious essay. 



In a note (E) appended to the second edition of Mr. G. A. 

 Rowell's pamphlet ' On the Beneficent Distribution of the Sense 

 of Pain'*, that gentleman inserts an abstract of a paper read 

 before the Ashmolean Society of Oxford, and intended to show 

 that Mr. Darwin's great theory fails to account for the peculiar 

 instinct which leads the Cuckoo to lay her eggs in the nests of 

 other birds. We desire here merely to call the attention of our 

 readers to Mr. Rowell's publication, and will only remark that 

 the parasitic habits of Cuculus canorus are not more inexplicable 

 than the parasitic habits of other animals. It is the isolation of 

 the circumstance (as regards British Birds) which makes it 

 seem so unintelligibly strange to those persons whose acquaint- 

 ance with ornithology is limited to the species inhabiting this 

 country. The power of fascination successfully exercised by 

 the Cuckoo appears to us, like other cases of fascination, much 

 harder to be accounted for on Darwinian principles. 



2. French. 



For some reason or other there is a dearth of new ornitholo- 

 gical publications in France. In our last Number we could not 

 find one work to notice, for nothing seems to have been recently 

 hatched. Are our lively neighbours engaged in an incubation 

 which will end in a grand coup d'eclosion, or what ? The coun- 

 trymen of Buffon and Brisson, Savigny and Vieillot, Lesson and 

 Prince Charles-Lucien — it would be easy to continue the illus- 

 trious list — are surely not tired of ornithology ? We must fall 

 back upon our respected contemporary, the ' Revue et Magasin 

 de Zoologie,' in this our time of scarcity ; and yet its pages for 

 the past year do not offer an over-abundant supply of sustenance 

 to the ornithological reviewer always craving for fresh food. 

 M. Marchand supplies a series of figures (which, though rather 



* London : 1862 (Williams and Norgate), 8vo, p. 6L 



