NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 359 



or rather suggestion, which we will venture to make, and it is 

 this. Eighty years at least before Cotgrave published his 

 'Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues,' the word 

 grows was in use, and was applied in the first instance, as Prof. 

 Newton has hinted (op. cit.), to the " black game." These birds 

 from their colour and their haunts may well have been called 

 moor-crow* by the uninformed, and it is easy to see how, on 

 dropping the prefix, "crows" became "grows" in the pro- 

 nunciation of the vulgar. Whether there is any evidence of this 

 use of the word moor-crow, we are not at the present moment of 

 writing prepared to say ;* but we should not be surprised to find 

 it in the works of Hector Boece or Bishop Leslie, or their trans- 

 lators, or perhaps in Holinshed, who embodied so much of Boece 

 in his ' Chronicle/ But we must not pursue this subject further, 

 interesting enough though it be, or we shall have no room for 

 further criticism of the book before us. 



In the natural history of the Grouse, Mr. Macpherson has 

 found a delightful theme on which to exercise his pen, and bejing 

 himself a moor owner in Skye, with a knowledge of other moors 

 in the north, he has turned his opportunities to good account in 

 an essay of some seventy odd pages. As there is unfortunately 

 no index to this volume, it would have been a good plan if, 

 instead of the running headline " Manners of the Grouse," Mr. 

 Macpherson had substituted at the top of every right-hand page 

 the key-words indicating the contents of each page. Thus we 

 should have (from page 7 onwards) "Distribution," "Introduction 

 into Shetland," "Exportation," "Time of Laying," "Nest and 

 Eggs," "Food," "Tame Grouse," "Perching in Trees," "Pug- 

 nacity," " Preponderance of Males," " Packing," " Separation of 

 the Sexes," "Long Flights," "Heather Burning," "Enemies 

 of Grouse," "Vermin," "Plumage," "Hybrids," "Weight," 

 "Poaching," and "Netting." These headings furnish a good 

 indication of the variety of subjects which are dealt with in con- 

 nection with Grouse ; but the remarks on heather-burning are 

 much too brief, and we are surprised to find no allusion made to 

 the very important matter of Grouse-disease. Nor are these 

 subjects dealt with by Mr. Stuart Wortley in the second part of 



* In Cornwall the Black-headed Gull is known as Mire-croiv, and Carr- 

 crow is an old Lincolnshire name for the Black Tern. 



