174 
THE GOLDEN DIVER. 
that book is long out of print and prohibitive 
in price : and its only successor is Mr. W. H. 
Hudson’s Birds of La Plata, two volumes, 1920, 
which represents his own contribution to A rgen- 
tine Ornithology revised and brought up to date, 
and is easy to get and not dear. But it has two 
drawbacks for the traveller to Paraguay and 
Southern Brazil. It only professes to give the 
birds of La Plata, a long way off to the south, 
and thus leaves out many Paraguay birds, 
and it is also limited to birds Mr. Hudson has 
seen himself; for, as he tells us in his Preface, 
he has ‘ thrown out ’ all Sclater’s work, which 
comprised the descriptions of birds unknown to 
Mr. Hudson. This renders the book much less 
use than it might have been to the ignorant and 
perplexed student; for no doubt many of the 
birds I could not identify in Paraguay or Brazil 
were contained in the rejected chapters. For 
these chapters doubtless describe many tropical 
forms found in the northern Argentine but 
absent from La Plata : and these were the very 
birds I wanted. However, in spite of these 
drawbacks, the book was invaluable. I should 
have been lost without it. And, let me add, 
what every naturalist knows, that there is 
an immense amount of information in Mr. 
Hudson’s earlier books. No one interested in 
nature should go to South America without 
reading A Naturalist in La Plata, the Purple 
Land, and Far Away and Long Ago . For 
