REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES 
71 
red clovers, elder, cinquefoil, scentless mayweed, field and milk 
thistles, toadflax, goosegrass, comfrey, white goosefoot, tufted 
vetch, common vetch, bird’s foot trefoil, cow parsnip, wild 
carrot, smaller knapweed, purple medick (called Lucerne at 
Mablethorpe), knot grass, privet, field convolvulus, dove’s foot 
crane’s bill, charlock, germander speedwell, burdock, stonecrop, 
upright meadow crowfoot, field scorpion grass, self heal and 
wart cress. 
My notes are quite unpretentious and to some may be con- 
sidered prolix observations, but common things have quite as 
wonderful and interesting life-stories to unfold as their rarer 
neighbours. Indeed, there are many common things, of which 
we know but little, and which deserve close study. Hugh 
Miller has rightly and eloquently written that : — “ Nature will 
be reported ; all things are engaged in writing its history. The 
plant, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling 
rock leaves its scratches on the mountain, the river its channel 
in the soil, the animal its bones in the stratum, the fern and leaf 
their modest epitaph in the soil. The air is full of sounds, the 
sky of tokens, the ground of memoranda and signatures ; and 
every object is covered over with hints, which speak to the 
intelligent.” 
I wish to express my indebtedness to my friend, Mr. S. C. 
Carter, of Louth, for kindly identifying some of the plants 
above enumerated. 
REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES. 
The Great North-west and the Great Lake Region of North America. By Paul 
Fountain. Longmans. Price los 6d. net. 
Like his two previous volumes this is a simply-told narrative of Mr. Fountain’s 
experiences in America nearly forty years ago. He writes professedly as a 
sportsman rather than as a naturalist ; but he has, we are glad to see, as little 
sympathy with the wholesale slaughterer of animals as with the reckless destroyer 
of timber-forests. “ There is,” he writes, “ a great fascination in tracking and 
shooting big game, a fascination that wants a certain amount of checking, or the 
sportsman degenerates into a common butcher. Excessive slaughter is, in my 
opinion, one of the most selfish of crimes ; for though man has an hereditary 
interest in the wild creatures of the world, it is an entailed, not an absolute, 
interest, and it is his bounden duty to remember and guard the interests of his 
successors. He who exterminates all the game on an estate deprives his descen- 
dants of one of the chief pleasures of possession. On a private estate the mischief 
may not be irreparable ; on a public one (the waste places of the world at large), 
it certainly is. Therefore, the man who would not be considered a public enemy 
ought to shoot, however remote the hunting-ground, with moderation. There are 
others to come after him ; and a world denuded of wild creatures would be a 
spoiled world.” 
The author is, we think, needlessly insistent in his diatribes against museum 
naturalists mainly on the ground of their discriminating between European and 
