154 
NATURE NOTES 
menally cheap at the price at which it is issued. Since a good deal has appeared 
in these pages of late as to the imitative faculty in birds, our readers will be 
specially interested in that one of the two illustrations which Messrs. Dent kindly 
Master and Pupil : Hooded Crow flying with Peewits. 
allow us to reproduce in which a hooded crow is imitating the flight of the 
peewit. But for their wings the gaillemots in the other picture might be a 
colony of penguins. 
Plant Sitcdies : an elementary Botany. By Professor J. M. Coulter. Henry 
Kimpton. Price 7s. 6d. net. 
Professor Coulter’s name is now well-known as a guarantee of excellent 
educational work, previous volumes issued from the botanical department of the 
University of Chicago having earned him this repute. The present book, one of 
the “ Twentieth Century Text-books,” is professedly a school book and mainly 
compiled from his two previous volumes, “Plant Relations” and “Plant 
Structures.” It comprises less than 400 pages with illustrations on almost every 
page, and falls, as the writer says, “into two divisions, the first fourteen chapters 
being dominated by Ecology, . . . the remaining eleven . . . by Morphology.” 
It is not merely a reader, nor is it a laboratory guide ; but it will prove, we do 
not doubt, eminently stimulating to a beginner. Perhaps our transatlantic 
botanists dwell unnecessarily on leaf-mosaic and indulge somewhat freely in 
Kernerism ; but a first book that deals with seed-dispersal, symbiosis, and plant 
societies (in over 50 pages), and gives 120 pages to the Cryptogamia and 16 to 
Gymnosperms, as against 25 to Angiosperms, is at any rale refreshingly novel. 
Many of the illustrations are exquisite, though the highly surfaced paper they 
require renders the volume fatigueingly heavy. 
Nature Songs. By Emily Reai Wells Gardner, Darton and Co. 
Two things go to make a poem, the thought and its expression. No one who 
critically examines this dainty little volume containing some fifty short poems can 
deny that Miss Read very often, if not always, has a truly poetic thought. It is 
perhaps a harmless pedantry to give these fancies such portentous names as 
“ Commensalism,” “ Dehiscence,” “ Foraminifera,” or “ Hypnum Triquetrum ” ; 
