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BIRD-LIFE AND STRUCTURE. 
The Structure | and | Life of Birds | By | F. W. Heaptey, M.A., F.Z.S. | 
. | with Seventy-eight Illustrations | London | Macmillan and Co. |. . | 
1895 | . . [8vo. cloth, pp. xx-+412, with frontispiece and 77 illustrations]. 
THE aim of this book, so the author tells us, ‘is to give good evidence 
of the development of birds from reptilian ancestors,’ to tell of their 
‘colours, song, instinct, reason, and migration.’ To honestly review 
such a book in the space at my disposal is impossible; it will, how- 
ever, enable me to recommend the work to those who are desirous 
of studying birds biologically. It is a fair reflection of the change 
which is coming over the study of natural history. The old out-door 
ornithologists are to-day’s sportsmen, who study the bionomics of their 
quarry that they may outwit them ; whilst the new naturalists, or a large 
portion, turn rather to scalpel and microscope for original research. 
Mr. Headley’s work is not intended for the so-called beginner, 
there is no attempt at a popular treatment, several of its chapters, 
though not chopped into paragraphs and loaded with heavy-faced 
letters, are real helps to exact work. The ornithologist, unless he is 
well acquainted with avian and reptilian anatomy, will not read far 
before he will find it necessary to refer to actual specimens. The 
book, without doubt, has been written from such types, to which it 
‘Flight’ (102 pages) and ‘Form and Function’ (112 pages) are 
excellent work, full of admirable matter, and though the book loses 
its balance from them, it would be hard to say where they might 
judiciously be curtailed. 
The get-up of the book, printing, and illustrations are good, 
though the latter are too few for the treatment the topic is accorded. 
Two diagrams, for instance, of the skeletons of a bird and a lizard are 
made the subject of many references, yet they are printed back 
to back, and lettered at right angles to each other. The two on one 
sheet, lettered in one direction, and folded to open outside the margin 
of the book, would be very useful. One objects naturally also to such 
Statements as ‘all the many buttercups are yellow or white,’ for if the 
buttercup-tribe is meant, the assertion has no weight. Or, again, the 
remark that ‘it is rarely that we find among flowers even an order in 
which red, blue, and yellow are represented,’ makes one think that the 
members of the pea-tribe and others are unknown to the author, which 
is almost confirmed when he tells us that ‘in the multitudinous British 
composite, red is unknown.’ I hold it as unfair for a writer on birds 
to extol the colouring of exotic species by comparisons with English 
flowers, when the latter are not given their full value for their colour 
Dec. 1895. 
