NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 239 



to deal with known phenomena, and to group them in such a 

 manner as to admit of their being compared with the mental 

 faculties of man — and this course has been adopted by our 

 author. 



After a critical examination of the views of previous writers, 

 occupying nearly fifty pages, Dr. Foveau de Courmelles, in suc- 

 cessive chapters, deals with instinct, qualities and defects in 

 animals, their intuitive faculties, their faculty of conception 

 (such as memory inherited or otherwise, association of ideas, 

 recognition of portraits, imagination, &c.) ; mimicry ; fear and 

 its manifestations ; sleep, and death ; foresight, and prognosti- 

 cation of weather; sensibility; emotions ; affections and passions. 

 Altogether a fascinating book, full of curious and suggestive 

 facts. 



In M. Locard's volume (3), on oysters and edible molluscs, 

 we have a book of a very different kind, yet withal a useful 

 and instructive one. The main idea is " food supply," and how 

 to provide man with wholesome, varied, and sufficient sustenance 

 is the problem which the author considers to be one of the most 

 important at the present day. He points out what indeed has 

 been long known to naturalists, namely, that there is a great deal 

 of good wholesome food to be obtained, which costs next to 

 nothing, but which, either from ignorance or prejudice, is not 

 utilised ; and this is especially the case with a great variety of 

 molluscs. Concerning the natural history of these, we do not 

 find much that English readers have not already learnt 

 from such books as Lovell's ' Edible Mollusca ' ; but there are 

 some useful statistics from French sources, and a curious chapter 

 on Oyster-culture in the Middle Ages which is not without 

 interest. 



Dr. Paul Girod's treatise (4), on animal colonies and associ- 

 ations, goes over familiar ground. The subject is a popular one, 

 and has often furnished a theme to writers on natural history 

 topics. Hence it was hardly to be expected that anything very 

 new could be written about it. Even in the case of the Inverte- 

 brate animals, concerning which the majority of people know 

 far less than they do of the Vertebrata, great advances in know- 

 ledge have been made of late years ; and, thanks to such volumes 

 as Sir John Lubbock's ' Senses of Animals,' the same writer's 

 'Ants, Bees and Wasps,' and Prof. Van Beneden's * Animal 



