KTWW5 



British Diving Ducks. By J. G. MiUais, F.Z.S., M.B.O.U., 

 Vol. II. Seventeen coloured and twenty-five uncoloured 

 plates. Longmans. In two volumes, £12 12s. net. 



In our last volume (pp. 365-70) we gave an extended notice 

 of the first part of Mr. Millais's beautiful work on the 

 Diving Ducks. In this second and concluding volume 

 Mr. MUlais discusses the Eiders, Scoters, and Mergansers, 

 and gives chapters " On the various Methods of Shooting 

 Ducks," and " On the Rearing of Ducks for Shooting and 

 the keeping of Ornamental Waterfowl in confinement." 



There are many beautiful coloured plates in this volume 

 by Messrs. Thorburn (adults in full plumage), Millais (adults 

 and soft parts), Murray Dixon (eclipse plumages), and 

 Gronvold (eggs and young in down). The author also 

 contributes black-and-whites of courtship and other scenes, 

 while a large number of other black and white plates are 

 devoted to photographs of skins to show sequences of plumages. 

 With regard to the latter, we think it would have been more 

 useful to the student had the photographs been fewer and 

 on a larger scale. We cannot either approve of Mr. MiUais's 

 plan, adopted throughout this work, of stating the supposed 

 exact age of each bird. This is fixed merely on the sup- 

 position that all the birds of any one species hatched in 

 any particular year are born on the same date ! Mr. Millais 

 carries this method to absurdity when he states, for 

 instance, that the King -Eider attains the adult-plumage 

 when it is 28| months old. Other confusing consequences 

 of this method are that birds of a supposed certain number 

 of months old are described often when they are half in 

 one plumage and half in another, and the figures in the 

 plates are arranged according to the supposed ages of the 

 specimens instead of according to the plumage they are in. 

 What we require is to have a description of each plumage 

 through which the bird passes and this is by no means 

 clear from Mr. Millais's descriptions, as many who have 

 been working at the subject have already discovered. It 

 seems a pity that so fine a work full of such good material 

 should not have been arranged in this respect on a more 

 scientific and at the same time more useful plan. 



On the other hand, Mr. Millais's arrangement of the 

 distributional details is excellent, and his accounts of the 



