658 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 96. 



been spent in the West, where, as a military 

 officer, he has been stationed at remote outposts 

 from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast, 

 and from Arizona to Oregon. During his army 

 life he took part in various Indian wars and had 

 command of various exploring expeditions, 

 traveling thousands of miles on horseback over 

 the deserts and mountains of the far west. He 

 thus had very exceptional opportunities for the 

 study of birds in the field. On his retirement 

 from the army he came east, at the solicitation 

 of Prof Baird, and was made Honorary Curator 

 of the Department of Oology in the United 

 States National Museum, which position he still 

 holds. When he came he brought with him the 

 largest and most valuable collection of birds' 

 eggs ever gathered by one person in America, a 

 collection numbering about 15,000 eggs. 



Professor Baird, knowing the extent and value 

 of Major Bendire's field notes, asked him .to 

 write a work on our birds, with special reference 

 to their breeding habits, but unhappily did not 

 live long enough to see even its beginning. 



Since coming east Major Bendire has spent 

 several summers in the field, chiefly in the 

 Adirondack region in northern New York, thus 

 supplementing his knowledge of the habits of 

 western birds by studies of our eastern species. 

 He is a keen observer and his wide field experi- 

 ence has made him personally familiar with 

 nearly all the species of which he writes. In 

 addition to his own notes he has secured from 

 others a large mass of unpublished manuscript 

 prepared expressly for the present work. The 

 quantity of this original contributed matter is 

 surprising and is vastly greater than that brought 

 together by any author since the time of Au- 

 dubon. 



The work does not require comparison with 

 any other, because no other covers the same 

 ground. It is not in any sense a technical trea- 

 tise and does not contain descriptions of the 

 birds themselves, though in the case of closely 

 related geographic races the points of difierence 

 are often clearly stated. On the other hand, 

 unlike the works of Audubon and Wilson, it 

 contains little in the way of personal narrative, 

 although now and then the pages are enlivened 

 by an anecdote or entertaining bit of personal 

 experience. So far as the geographic distribu- 



tion, food habits and breeding habits go, it is not 

 too much to say that the work fairly represents- 

 the state of knowledge on these subjects at 

 time of going to press. The proofs of the sec- 

 ond volume were read more than a year aga 

 (in June 1895) and the book is dated 1895, but 

 through unfortunate delays in the Government 

 printing oflBce, it did not appear till September 

 of the present year (1896). The reprehensible 

 practice of some of the departments of Govern- 

 ment of permitting their publications to bear a 

 date a year or more anterior to the actual date of 

 publication, cannot be too strongly condemned. 

 Bendire's ' Life Histories' is the only book 

 ever published that contains reliable ' down to 

 date' accounts of the food habits and breeding 

 ranges of our birds, with descriptions of their 

 nests and eggs. Special attention has been 

 given to the geographic distribution of the- 

 various species, but the ranges are defined by 

 means of political and geographical boundaries 

 without reference to the faunal areas. The work 

 as a whole is indispensable tq students of North 

 American birds and will long remain the stand- 

 ard authority on the subjects of which it treats. 

 Both the author and the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion are to be congratulated on the excellence 

 of the colored plates, which were drawn by 

 John L. Ridgway and reproduced by Ketter- 

 linus. C. H. M. 



Economic Entomology for the Farmer and Fruit 

 Grower^ and for Use as a Text-book in Agri- 

 cultural Schools and Colleges. By John B. 

 Smith, So. D. J. B. Lippincott Company, 

 Philadelphia. 1896. 



Dr. Smith's experience as a teacher of 

 economic entomology and as an investigator in 

 this field has eminently fitted him for the 

 authorship of this volume, just received from 

 the press. Entomologists have been very fortu- 

 nate during the past two years in witnessing 

 the publication first of Comstock's admirable 

 ' Manual for the Study of Insects,' second, Dr, 

 Sharp's excellent consideration of the class 

 ' Insecta ' in Volume V. of the Cambridge 

 Natural History and lastly of the volume now 

 before us. Dr. Smith, in writing specifically 

 for the farmer and fruit grower, and for th^ stu- 

 dents in agricultural colleges and schools has 



