112 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS, 



The Birds of Oxfordshire. By 0. V. Aplin. 8vo, pp. 217, 

 With a coloured Frontispiece (the Alpine Chough), and a 

 folding Map of the County. Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1889. 



The ornithological literature of Oxfordshire, so far as Mr. 

 Aplin has been able to trace it, is not extensive, but dates back to 

 the latter part of the seventeenth century. 



" ■ Oxfordshire,' writes Camden in 1586, ' abounds with all sorts of 

 game both for hunting aud hawking '; but when Chiidrey in 1661 brought 

 out his ' Britannia Baconica, or the Natural Rarities of England and 

 Wales,' in which work he appears to have collated all the published accounts 

 of the natural history of each county, he dismissed Oxon in a few lines, 

 making no mention of its Zoology, and it is not until 1677 that the 

 Ornithology of the county seems to have received any attention. In that 

 year appeared ' The Natural History of Oxfordshire,' by Robert Plot, a 

 folio work dedicated to Charles II. Chapter VII., in which the author 

 treats ' Of Brutes,' contains a few notes upon birds, which will be quoted 

 under the heads of the several species to which they refer. A second 

 edition appeared in 1705. Dr. Plot was elected one of the Secretaries of 

 the Royal Society in 1681. He was a ftiend of Pepys and Evelyn, and 

 the latter tells us, in his ' Diary,' that, when at Oxford in 1675, he went to 

 see * that rare collection of natural curiosities of Dr. Plot's, of Magdalen 

 Hall, all of them collected in this shire.' The collection comprised among 

 other things certain 'foules,' — but what these were Evelyn does not say, 

 probably the Cormorant killed from St. Mary's steeple, — and the white 

 Linnet, given to him by Mr. Lane, of Deddington, were included in the 

 collection. • 



" In the account of Oxfordshire birds by the Revs. A. and H. Matthews, 

 to be more fully mentioned below, the authors refer to ' an old manuscript 

 list of birds, collected by the late Dr. Lamb of Newbury, extending as far 

 back as the latter part of the last century,' which was lent for their perusal 

 by Dr. Tomkins of Abingdon. Under the title of ' Ornithologia Bercheria' 

 the list was, some years afterwards, printed in ■ The Zoologist ' (1880, pp. 

 313 — 325), the Editor furnishing the following information relating to it: 

 — ' This list, it would seem, was originally intended for publication in the 

 1 Transactions of the Linnean Society,' and was forwarded for that purpose, 

 about the year 1814, to Thomas Marsham, who was then Treasurer of that 

 Society. For some reason, however, it never appeared, and the original 

 MS., as we learn from the Assistant-Secretary, was either lost or mislaid 

 during the subsequent removal of the Society from the rooms formerly 



