322 Bibliographical Notices. rior, and each, isolated, and careless of the rest, clears his little spot in the wilderness ; others remain at the port, gather from all sides the produce of their wandering brethren, and return to them the wares of other countries, or the value, in the current coin, of their own crude materials, which, isolated, had become but so much useless lumber. So it is in natural science : there are backwoodsmen in natural history, — men who furnish the raw material of science, as well as merchants, who convert that raw material into handy, available knowledge. And in the case of science as in that of ordinary Ufe, it is of importance that the capitalists and the productive classes should understand that their interests are common, and that each derives his importance from the other. We must have out-of-door naturalists before we have in-door natu-ralists, and any supercilious depreciation of one another cannot but remind a dispassionate observer of the old story of the belly and the members. The author of the present work has furnished us with a book of the backwoodsman class. Some books are said to " smell of the lamp," — this " babbles o' green fields." It is redolent of new hay and the hedge violet. Far away from the study of the anatomist, from the museum of the zoologist, it calls to mind nature in the concrete. We study analogies and affinities, beauties of adaptation and marvellous homologies, until we forget that after all, these creatures we dissect are not mere pieces of mechanism, but live and breathe, and have affections, and impulses, not absolutely dissimilar to our own. Such a book as this carries us from our skeletons and preparations, back to the recollection of the overflowing life of nature, to the trill of the skylark, and the caw of the rook busy overhead, what time we wandered not too scientifically thoughtful, nor yet without observa-tion, along some green lane, while the hare now and then crossed the path, and the partridge rose whirring from the cornfield. To those who take a scientific interest in nature without caring to penetrate into the hidden mysteries of organization, the Rev. Mr. Jenyns's work will be most acceptable. It will find a place on their shelves beside ' The Natural History of Selbourne.' It is full of curious information upon the habits of the denizens of our fields and woods, and some excellent remarks upon "Habits of observing" are prefixed. We cannot too heartily applaud the observations upon the import-ance and dignity of facts as such, and apart from any obvious imme-diate bearing (p. 13). Let those who would take the high a-priori road in science bethink them whether it may not be of more import-ance to establish even such a simple fact as that the field cricket " drops its dung on a little platform at the mouth of its hole," than to prop up with quite remarkable ingenuity the hypothesis that the said field cricket is a " mucus animal of the third power — ovum^ ! "
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