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Review



home—had, remembering that truly British adage, “ If it’s alive, kill

it,” shot him.


What if the swift blue wings were closed for ever ? No doubt

justice had been done. The neighbourhood had been saved from the

dread spectre of “ Psittacosis ”. What did our feelings matter ? After

all Humanity comes first.


There is no moral to be drawn from this little story—at least, not

now that “ Psittacosis ” is no longer fashionable. If it were there might

have been one !



REVIEW


THE TRAIL THAT IS ALWAYS NEW


This is the attractive and most apposite title chosen by

Mr. Willoughby Lowe for his reminiscences of forty years’ bird¬

collecting, which has just been published by Messrs. Gurney and

Jackson (price 16s.), a wonderful record of travel and observation of

nature (particularly bird-life) in North America, the East, Tropical

Africa, and elsewhere, which must interest everyone who can enjoy

a well-written account of happenings in such places, and happenings

which are not the common lot, though all in the day’s work, of the

man whose business brings him into such close touch with wild nature.

The book is a regular O.D.T.A.A. (to borrow the title of a fairly recent

and enthralling adventure story), but with this great difference : “ the

things ” which fill the Trail are not the hair-raising adventures of the

novel, but a series of word-pictures of bird and other wild life inter¬

spersed with descriptions of the ordinary daily life of a collector, though

the events would hardly be ordinary to most of us, and above all, as

Mr. Bannerman says in his preface, accuracy is stamped on every page,

and the whole made interesting by one whose wide experience has made

him a master of his subject and whose book now shows how competent

he is to pass this experience on to others with interest.


One of Mr. Lowe’s temporary retainers in West Africa put the case

well, when he said : “ Dis Lo, he savvy tings too much. He know all

my heart tink, all dat all man tink, before me do it, he know it; and



