SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



igi 



instance: "The frog, like the common snipe — that 

 in some districts has got very uncommon — likes a 

 nice dry place to ' absquatulate ' in and to think 

 matters over ; for froggy is by nature very con- 

 templative. The herons know all about this weak- 

 ness of his, and they glide like shadows to where 

 he sits, with his beautiful eyes staring at nothing 

 in particular, and 'embalm' him." How much 

 more effective would have been this paragraph 



great shrike, for one was seen in the same place 

 to which I have above referred, in the year 1891. 

 Three, or it may be four, dead ones have been 

 shown me in the course of the last seven years, 

 and all these had been shot in a sort of ' no man's 

 land' district, where old orchards still existed." 

 There is much delightful reading in this book, but 

 it is unnecessarily disfigured in some places by 

 paltry little expressions which could have been so 



I 





A Hawfinch. (From "In the Green Leaf and the Sere.") 



I 



without the term " absquatulate " ; for the word 

 " embalm " there remains so many other words in 

 our language far more expressive. Not that all is 

 of this manner, for occasionally we meet with pages 

 where the word pictures are those to ponder over. 

 Writing of the great shrike, " A Son of the Marshes" 

 says : " Certain flight lines are followed by a certain 

 class of birds, even although the inducement that 

 at one time caused them to follow those lines may 

 have ceased to exist. This is the case with the 



easily spared ; for instance, " a certain class of 

 wind-bag ornithologists." The illustrations are 

 spirited, and produced as well as half-tone process 

 work ever succeeds. With the permission of the 

 publishers we give one of them here, representing 

 a hawfinch in an alder tree. The book is one we 

 can quite recommend, though it would have been 

 much improved by a little better taste having been 

 exercised in eliminating a number of commonplace 

 colloquialisms. 



