SHORT NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
235 
“personal kindliness and consideration that it will be a lasting pleasure to 
remember.” One of these, Pere Morice, who works among the Carriers, is 
spoken of with enthusiasm. This “prince of missionaries,” as Mr. Somerset 
styles him, “has invented a most ingenious syllabary, which is easily learnt, so 
that Indians who have no idea what writing is, have been known to learn to read 
and write this language in perfect correctness after two or three days’ instruction.” 
In this syllabary they have books and a monthly review, Pere >Iorice being his 
own editor, compositor, and printer. The book is full of interesting matter, told 
in a simple unaffected (sometimes even colloquial) way which makes it very 
pleasant reading. There are excellent maps and a large number of small and 
less excellent, but still useful illustrations. 
SHORT NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
London Birds and Beasts, by J. T. Tristram- Valentine, F.L.S., F.Z.S., with 
a preface by Frank E. Beddard, F.R.S., pp. xii., 319. (London, Horace Cox, 
1895). Price 3s. 6d. 
The title of this work is somewhat misleading, and might be more so if the 
reader were told that “beasts” included insects! In point of fact the book is 
divided into two parts ; the first treats of various creatures in captivity in London 
(at the Zoological Gardens), and the second of the wild birds of London. There 
are also gathered together, in an appendix, some varied studies of ornithology, 
ancient books, &c. The articles, which chiefly have reference to new arrivals 
at the Gardens, were published from time to time in the Saturday Review, 
and would have been better for a little paring down before they appeared in book 
form. The introductory padding, which is excellent in a newspaper article, 
becomes a little tiresome when we read the articles as continuous chapters ; a point 
which will probably occur to those who, as Mr. Beddard hopes, may carry the 
volume with them to the Gardens and study it with the animals before them. Its 
use as a guide at the present day is rather discounted by the fact that some of the 
papers are a little out of date, the author having been dead, we believe, about 
two years. But all the articles on birds, beasts and insects at the Gardens will well 
repay perusal, and those who love quaint old natural history books (a love of 
which was another passion of the author’s life, as we are told in Mr. Gordon 
Wigan’s Introduction) will find much to interest them. The chapters on wild 
birds in London strike us as rather slight, and hardly worthy of the rest 
of the book. Commenting in 1891, as he could hardly fail to do, on the 
enormous increase of the wood pigeons in the London parks, the author hazards 
no guess as to the cause. To us the curious point about it is the suddenness and 
rapidity of the increase, for although we know that a great increase in the 
numbers of this species has taken place in some parts of Britain, yet we are not 
aware of any such in the immediate neighbourhood of London. Why should not 
the increase have begun at an earlier date? We take it that the parks do not 
afford a much safer asylum now than they did ten years ago. It must be long 
since the birds-nesting boy had a free hand there, still longer since one could carry 
a gun, or wait for pigeons, under the ornamental trees. The increase is curious, 
and its cause we have yet to learn. It is not only in London, of the great towns 
of Europe, that we find wood pigeons. We have seen them among the trees in 
the little “ Park ” at Brussels, and in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris. Here, 
practically in the Bois de Boulogne, we should expect many birds to come, but 
the very tamest wood pigeons we ever saw were in the old Jardin des Plantes, in 
a thickly populated, busy, and rather sordid part of the city. 
O. V. A. 
The handsome volume devoted to Whittingham Vale, Northumberland : its 
History, Traditions, and Folklore (Newcastle, Redpath), is the outcome, so a 
modest note accompanying our copy informs us, of “ the leisure hours’ employ- 
ment of two village tradesmen.” We heartily congratulate the Messrs. Dixon — 
