232 
NATURE NOTES. 
The beautiful edition of White’s Selborne, for which we are indebted to 
Messrs. Macmillan (price los.), claims the next place. The book itself has long 
ceased to need commendation ; but this reprint, filled as it is with illustrations 
of Selborne and of its birds and beasts, will introduce the work to quarters where 
it is yet unknown. We predicate this with the more certainty as the edition was 
primarily prepared for the American market, and thus fittingly has an introduction 
from the pen of the one man best qualified to write it, Mr. John Burroughs, who 
visited Selborne in 1882. This introduction is short, but, like all that Mr. 
Burroughs writes, it is true. “ When one reads the writers of our own day upon 
rural England and the wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of 
the Selborne naturalist ; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate 
intent to write up Nature. They choose their theme, the theme does not choose 
them. They love the birds and the flowers for the literary effects they can pro- 
duce out of them.” There is much truth in this, and it comes from one who 
practises what he preaches, for Mr. Burroughs’s own books have, perhaps, more 
than any others of the kind, the sobriety and quiet interest which is so eminently 
characteristic of Selborne. Mr. Clifton Johnson’s illustrations are so beautiful 
that they almost — but not quite— reconcile us to the aggressively shiny paper 
which is the one defect of the book. 
Country Pastimes for Boys, by P. Anderson Graham (Longmans, 6s.) has 
been out for some few months ; it appeared, if we mistake not, in time to be 
useful during the summer holidays. But it is eminently a book for a Christ- 
Me.\do\v I'lPii’s Nest. 
mas box, and parents and guardians, should they find it has as yet no place 
on the playroom shelf, are recommended to remedy the deficiency as soon as 
possible. Nearly two hundred out of the four hundred and fifty pages are 
