NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 357 



Lee-Hamilton's " Sea-Shell Murmurs," is it necessary to ask 

 whether the writer was acquainted with the Mollusca ? Would 

 any botanist adversely criticize those exquisite lines which have 

 come to us from the ages, and will go down with them : " Con- 

 sider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither 

 do they spin " ? 



We prefer to make our standpoint clear in noticing this 

 excellent and conscientious compilation of the bird-lore of 

 Tennyson, which is a complete ornithological concordance to the 

 works of the most read and best loved English poet. But the poet 

 is always greater than his facts ; the " Merman," " Mermaid," 

 and " Talking Oak " are strictly outside the canons of biology, 

 and so we may thankfully say is all poetry. It may seem irony 

 for a zoologist to seek to defend poetry from the claims of his 

 own science, but, though the poet ceases to be one when he is 

 untrue to nature, he is still outside all the ologies. 



The Norfolk Broads. By William A. Dutt and other Con- 

 tributors. Methuen & Co. 



Broadland is alike loved by the naturalist, angler, and 

 boating tourist, though the increased visits of the last have 

 proved anything but an unmixed pleasure to the first ; the 

 broads are rapidly becoming holiday resorts, and certain riparian 

 owners have asserted their most unpopular rights and privileges. 

 How a Thoreau would have enjoyed and described these 

 glorious meres, whose fauna, alas ! is not now what the old-time 

 Broadland marshmen so well remember. Who can forget the 

 birds, the plants, or the big Bream of these winter, perhaps, but 

 now no longer summer, solitudes. No one book can exhaust 

 the tale that the Broadland naturalist can unfold, and we have 

 long wondered why some wealthy naturalist, associated with one 

 of our mighty publishers, has not before this commenced to pub- 

 lish a large fully illustrated folio work on the fauna and flora of 

 this region. It is worth doing, and the men are now living in 

 Norfolk who could write it. It is no disparagement of Mr. 

 Dutt's excellent and beautifully illustrated volume to say this ; 

 it is, on the contrary, the perusal of this, the best book up to date 



