34 f'he South Australian Naturalist. 
never fail to remind me of charming ladies with dainty blue silk 
dresses and mauve bonnets. But this year \vc must come later 
than the first week of November to sec them at their sweetest 
perfection. No lover of nature can reflect without sadness upon 
the slow but inevitable destruction of these beautiful flowers. 
Only the poverty of the soil has enabled them to escape the ruth- 
less fire-stick or the engulfing ploughshare. A few short years 
and the flaunting charlock and the prickly thistle shall dance over 
the eraves of a beauty gone bevond recall. 
— W. H, 
REVIEW. 
“A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FISHES/’ by Bashford Dean, 
edited and extended by Eugene Willis Gudger with the co- 
operation of Arthur Wilbur Henn; 3 volumes, American Museum 
of Natural History, New York.— “A painful work it is I’ll assure 
you, and more than difficult, wherein that toyle hath been taken, 
as no man thinketh so no man believeth, but he that hath made 
the trial!.” To few books surely were such statement more applic- 
able than to the three-volume memorial under notice, d’he work 
was not written with the certainty that it would be read, it can- 
not be read; it is a book that must be available to every worker 
on fishes throughout the world. The prefaces to Vol. I. and III. 
are, however, most readable and describe the operation of making 
the books. Though dedicated, so to speak, to ichthyologists, 
students of morphology, thinkers in evolution and others, will 
find much “meat” in the 2,000 odd pages required to contain a 
mass of information, the collection and collation of which must 
have been a stupendous undertaking. Writing privately on the 
subject of this Bibliography, the editor said:— “It has truly been 
a colossal task and had T known when I took the matter up some 
years ago how prodigious and nerve-racking it would be, I cer- 
tainly would have hesitated before undertaking it. But now it 
is done.” It is regretted that in such a small and local publica- 
tion as the “S.A. Naturalist” no adequate review can be offered, 
but the authors will recognise our limitations and realise, in the 
few words printed, our deepest admiration for the work and 
assiduity and concentration of the workers. Tests on entries 
dealing with Australian Ichthyology, a subject with which wc 
are somewhat acquainted, indicate that the references are complete, 
we can scarcely say more. 
■E. R. W. 
