32 THE OSPREY. 



expiring faun^ of the Mascarene and Sandwich Islands which have been des- 

 cribed by him in a number of papers. He has been one of the Vice-Presidents 

 of the Royal Society, and a number of times of the Zoological Society. In 

 1900, the Linnsean Society of London awarded him its gold medal for his 

 achievements in science, and he also received one of the Royal Medals of the 

 Royal Society. 



In addition to his being the author of A Dictionary of Birds and other 

 books and memoirs already mentioned, he published in 1862 Zoology of Ancient 

 Europe, and in 1863 The Ornithology of Iceland (Appendix to Mr. Baring- 

 Gould's work on that Island). His best known works, apart from the Dic- 

 tionary of Birds and the British Encyclopaedia Articles on Ornithology, are 

 Ootheca Wolleyana, (1864): "^ws" in the Record of Zoological Literature 

 (Vol. i-vi); Zoology (1874; 2d Ed., 1894); Birds of Greenland (Arctic 

 Manual, 1875); and his work on Yarrell's British Birds (4th Ed., Vol. i and 

 ii, 1871-82). He was also editor of the His from 1865 to 1870, and of The 

 Zoological Record from 1870 to 1872. 



Although Professor Newton is in his seventy-third year, he is still a 

 worker in science, and there is probably no ornithologist in Europe that takes 

 any keener interest in the progress of the science, and its present-day accom- 

 plishments and discoveries, than does the subject of the present brief biogra- 

 phical sketch. 



REVIEWS. 



Bulletin of the United States National Museum, No. 50. The 

 Birds op Nokth and Middle America; Part I, Fringillidae.— The Finches. 

 By Robert Ridgway. Washington, 1901 [actual date of publication, October 

 24]. Svo, pp. xxxii -f- 716; pis. I-XX. 



No one who has ever written a book, particularly one of scientific preten- 

 sions, can fail to appreciate in some measure at least the magnitude of the task 

 Mr. Ridgway has set for himself, in attempting satisfactorily to describe all 

 the 3000 species of birds in North and Middle America. For more than 

 twenty years the author has been collecting material for this work upon which, 

 since 1894, he has been steadily engaged, and of which the first part is just 

 now published. 



The area covered is the North American continent from the east end of the 



