131 
BIRD-NESTING IN NORTH-WEST CANADA. 
Bird-Nesting in North-West Canada. By Water RaINE. 
THIS is an 8vo. volume of nearly 200 pages, and describes an egg- 
collecting journey to some of the more out-of-the-way regions of 
Manitoba and Assiniboia, together with a description of the scenery 
between Toronto and Vancouver as observable from the Canadian 
Pacific line of railway. 
At the beginning of the book there is an index, but with 
separate headings for Ornithology and Zoology, which can scarcely 
be commended. 
Coloured plates of more or less merit, presumably from the 
pencil of the author, are interspersed throughout the work. € 
contains figures professedly of the eggs of the Knot obtained in 
Iceland, but in the absence of any record of the bird having been 
shot, or even seen, these illustrations lose something of the interest 
attaching to a thoroughly well identified observation. Minute 
descriptions and dimensions of specimens in the author's collection 
are useful, but somewhat tedious in their frequency to the general 
reader. 
In these days of rivalry, the practice of wholesale egg plundering 
cannot be too strongly censured; true scientific research should 
ever be linked with much discretion, and ‘understand rather than 
destroy’ should be the primary motive in all bona-fide investigation. 
Mr. Raine has apparently not fully grasped the importance of this 
most necessary discrimination, although some remarks on the last 
page of the book seem to point otherwise. No wonder reports come 
to us year by year about the rapid decrease in numbers of scarce 
birds when such thoughtlessness is indicated as in the following 
Passages, which, alas, are by no means the only ones of the kind :-— 
: Page 129. ‘The Iceland Gyr Falcon is a handsome bird and 
lays handsome eggs, as I can testify by a fine series of thirty-six eggs 
now before me, which is probably the largest series ever brought 
together ; all these eggs are from Iceland, where the birds breed among 
the crags of the sea-coast. The late W. C. Flint, of San Francisco, 
an enthusiastic oologist, had also a nice series of sets of the Iceland 
Falcon, which I obtained for him. ‘The series on the table before 
me were selected from close upon fifty specimens that have been 
Collected in Iceland this last six years.’ 
Again, pp. 53-54. ‘During the past five seasons my Iceland 
Collector has sent me some 350 eggs of the Snow Bunting. Out of 
this number were forty-one clutches of five eggs each, nineteen 
Clutches of four eggs, and eleven clutches of six eggs, so that five 
- : £888 appear to be the regular number. 
May 1894. 
