1114 
REVIEW. 
Indian Game Birds. 
The Editors offer no apology for borrowing from the “ Times Literary Supple- 
ment ” the subjoined review on Mr. Stuart Baker’s Game-Birds of India, Burma 
and Ceylon. There have been several very good reviews of these books in the 
home journals and all have been favourable, but the one we reproduce is, we 
think, the best and an excellent example of what a review should be. 
May we take this opportunity of asking members, who have been so fortunate as 
already to possess copies, to show those copies to their friends and point out the 
desirability of their too possessing them ! Copies are obtainable from Messrs. 
Thacker Spink & Co., Calcutta; Thacker & Co. and Taraporewalla & Co., Bombay; 
Higginbotham & Co., Madras, and from the Honorary Secretary of the Society. 
The price in India is : — Vol. I, Rs. 63. Vol. II, Rs. 55. (Postage and packing 
Rs. 2 extra on each volume). 
The Game-Birds of India, Burma, and Ceylon. By E.C. Stuart Baker. Vol- 
umes I. and II. (The Bombay Natural History Society, London : Bale, Sons 
and Danielsson. Vol. L, £4 4s.; Vol. II., £3 13s. 6d.) 
The Bombay Natural History Society has earned and is maintaining a high 
reputation. Its museum work is excellent ; and it was unfortunate that circum- 
stances made it impossible for the Prince of Wales to visit the admirable exhibi- 
tion which it had especially arranged for his inspection. The survey of the 
mammals of India, which the Society has in hand, is an imdertaking of the first 
importance. The Society’s Journal is among the best of the publications of its 
class ; and one of the outstanding features of the Journal for some time past has 
been the series of articles by Mr. Stuart Baker which, amended and brought up 
to date, form the material of these two volumes, being the first half of what is 
to be a five-volume work. 
India has always been fortunate in its winters on natural history. Among 
the multitude of keen sportsmen who have gone out in the Government Services, 
whether Civil or Military, there have been a large proportion of good amateur 
naturalists ; and when the first-class men arose, like Jerdon and Hume, they 
had an immense amount of accumulated knowledge ready to their hand. Both 
Jerdon’s work and the volumes of Hume and Marshall remain to-day astonish- 
ingly good. No one, not Mr. Stuart Baker or any other, can ever work in the 
same field without drawing largely on these two great reservoirs ; but the mere 
passage of time, with the progress of science and the changes in nomenclature 
and systematic method, in the couise of nearly half a century makes any book 
out of date. There is, therefore, abimdant room for this work on the game- 
birds, as there is also room for other monographs in special fields, which will 
doubtless follow. 
The first of the present volumes is only in a very limited sense new, being, in 
effect, a new edition, improved, added to and brought up to date, of the same 
author’s “ Indian Ducks and their Allies,” which appeared fourteen years ago. 
The changes in matter consist chiefly in the incorporation of new records and 
the adoption' — irritating but necessary— of the accepted modern nomenclature. 
One new species, or sub-species, of duck is, however, admitted ; for Mr. Baker 
accepts now as a legitimate sub-species of the common SpotbiU the birds of the 
Burmese type {Haringtoni) which, in his volume of 1908, he had declared to 
have “ nothing to distinguish them from ” the yoimg of the established species. 
It is, or to the lay mind wiU seem, a small matter. No one is likely to shoot 
or see this particular sub-species alive in its wild state without going to Burma, 
the Shan States, or Cochin, the area to which it is practically confined. And 
only a naturalist, if he did shoot it, would recognise it as in any way differing 
from the common form which is found aU over India, to the West, or from the 
Eastern form (another sub-species) which spreads over Trans-Baikalia, Eastern 
