REVIEWS AND EXCHANGES 135 
Volume deals with Igh'.ham Mote and that the other conducts us to Richborough 
and Sandwich, ramblers will realise that they have here many a treat in store. 
Kith ajid Kin: Poems of Animal Life. Selected by Henry S. Salt. George 
Bell and Sons. Price is. net. 
Mr. Salt is at least candid. He begins his Preface by saying : “ The editor 
of a collection of humane poems about animals is under this difficulty — that the 
material, whether judged by a poetic or a humane standard, is for the most part 
of a very third-rate order. Where the non-human races are concerned — birds 
perhaps excepted — the generality of poets, at no time too fastidious in their tastes, 
seem to be of opinion that anything is good enough for the occasion ; with the 
result that the treatment of animals in verse has been almost as bad as their 
treatment in actual life.” Nevertheless he has got together eighty-five little 
poems by fifty-six different authors, in a d.aintily printed and bound pocket 
volume which humanitarians will be glad to carry into the fields with them. 
Our Cotintry's Shells and how to Iniow them : a Guide to the British Mollusca. 
By W. J. Gordon. With a coloured illustration of every species, by A. 
Lambert. Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co. Price 6s. 
The thirty-three coloured plates in this work are a great improvement upon 
those in the companion volumes of the series ; but it is a grave mistake on the 
part of the publi.shers to arrange them facing one another with no tissue paper 
between them. Our copy arrived in a very stuck-together condition. The text 
is little more than a series of artificial keys to enable the collector to name his 
specimens, though there is a glossary and a brief synonymy. Dealing almost 
exclusively with the shell, there is, of course, little or no natural history in the 
volume ; but we have no doubt that it will serve admirably as a collector’s 
manual, and it is certainly remarkably cheap. 
Animal Life: a first hook of Zoology. By David Starr Jordan, Ph.D., LL.D., 
and Vernon L. Kellogg, M.S. London, Henry Kimpton. Printed at the 
Appleton Press, New York. Price 7s. 6d. net. 
This work, by two officers of the Leland Stanford Junior University, is one 
of a series of Twentieth Century Text-books edited by Dr. A. F. Nightingale of 
Chicago. Its purpose is best explained by the following opening remarks in the 
Preface. “The authors present this book as an elementary account of animal 
ecology — that is, of the relations of animals to their surroundings, and of the re- 
sponsive adapting or fitting of the life of animals to these surroundings. The book 
treats of animals from the point of view of the observer and student of animal life, 
who wishes to know why animals are in structure and habits as they are. The 
beginning student should know that the whole life of animals, that all the variety 
of animal form and habit, is an expression of the fitness of animals to the varied 
circumstances and conditions of their living, and that this adapting and fitting of 
their life to the conditions of living come about inevitably and naturally, and 
that it can be readily studied and largely understood. The ways and course of 
this fitting are the greatest facts of life, excepting the fact of life itself. In this 
kind of study of animals every observation of a fact in animal structure or 
behaviour leads to a search for the significance, or meaning in the life of the 
animal, of this fact. The veriest beginner can be, and ought to be, an inde- 
pendent observer and thinker. It is the phase of the study of zoology which 
appeals most strongly to the beginning student, the phase which treats of the 
why and how of animal form and habit. At the same time this phase is that to 
which the attention of the most advanced modern scholars of biology is rightly 
and chiefly turned.” The book itself contains 175 excellent illustrations, and 
discusses, in a manner necessarily all too brief but eminently suggestive, such 
topics as the life of Protozoa, colonies, sex, function and structure, embryology, 
the struggle for existence, adaptations, symbiosis, mimicry, instinct, and 
distribution. 
The Girls' Realm for June contains an illustrated article on “Birds in their 
little Nests,” by Mr. R. Kearton. 
Received : — Report and Transactions of the Ealing Natural Science ana 
Microscopical Society for 1899-1900; The Naturalist, The Naturalists' Journal, 
The Irish Naturalist, Knowledge, Science Gossip, Animal World, Our Animal 
Friends, Humanity and Agricuttural Economist for June. 
