402 Herr Badeker's and Hr. Brewer's Oological Works. 
may be conceived of the extent to which the illustration of varieties 
is carried. Notwithstanding this, the low price of the work is 
marvellous. 
Our limits will not permit us to comment at length upon 
all the four parts of Mr. Biideker's book; let us therefore take 
the first only. We can hardly go into the question as to what 
birds should be included as European, or recognized as good 
species, and what should not, but the views of those who con¬ 
sider the Aquila clanga of Pallas from Central Asia distinct 
from A. navia , may receive strength from the appearance of the 
eggs figured in Plate I., wherein the representations of the East¬ 
ern are decidedly larger, as is the case with the birds, and less 
deeply marked than those of the Western examples. In Plate 
II. the three figures of the eggs of the Osprey give but a faint 
idea of the numerous varieties presented by a really fine series, 
such as is possessed by at least one gentleman in this country. 
By Plate III. the characteristic differences of the eggs of the 
species of Buntings therein figured are very fairly preserved, and 
a respectable selection of each is given. For Plate IV., which 
comprises several of what according to the Editor are known in 
English as the “ Trush " and “ Ouzel," we cannot say so much. 
Those well-known favourites, “ oft the earliest of the year," to 
which we have been used all our lives, the eggs of the Misseltoe 
and Song Thrush, and the Blackbird, have small justice done to 
their beauty; and we should like to have known a little more 
about the specimens figured of the supposed eggs of the Turdus 
minor of Gmelin, than that they were sent from Labrador “ with 
the birds,"—a phrase greatly employed, it is true, by dealers, 
but which may mean anything or nothing, and we fancy in prac¬ 
tice most generally means the latter. Plates V. and VI. afford us 
some examples from the Grallatorial order, and it is in these 
figures that the chief defect of the artist first becomes very appa¬ 
rent. Any person slightly acquainted with the principles of 
drawing must know that a marking, be it spot or blotch of any 
B'adeker’s plates, should walk in the way of his father; but there can be 
little doubt that many of the so-called c species ’ erected by “ the sturdy 
Nestor of German Ornithologists ” are not even permanent local races, 
much less ‘ sub-species,’ as some naturalists have chosen to consider them. 
