1st inline reference point is missing. By Charles A. Witchell. New York: Macmillan & Co.; London: Adam and Charles Black. Pp. 253. Price, $1.75.—--Mariewalton (talk) 08:55, 10 August 2013 (UTC) (Wikisource contributor note)
atic treatment from ornithologists—Mr. Simeon Pearce Cheney, an American, being the only one who has published a special work of any considerable pretensions upon it. Mr. Witchell first thought of making a scientific investigation of it in 1881, while listening to a nightingale, from observing the repetition of a particular feature in its strains. After an interval of some years he became interested in the song of a thrush, and from the thrush was led to observe mimicry in other birds. As his observations were continued, the results assumed shape and now justify embodiment in a book. First he seeks for the origin of the voice, and finds it, with Darwin, in involuntary movements of the muscles—the excitement of combat being a possible occasion. The combat cries are serviceable also for purposes of alarm. A further development in the faculty of song is the call-cry, and from this the transition is not very great to the simplest songs, which are fixed and further developed and varied by heredity and imitation. In the filling out of the plan thus sketched, a chapter is devoted to noticeable incidents connected with bird-song, the influence of heredity is discussed, the causes and effects of variation in bird-song and the influence of imitation are inquired into, and an attempt is made to express the songs of various birds in musical notation with transcripts of the music sung by black-birds, thrushes, and skylarks. The book covers a field not occupied by any of the numerous bird books now current, except, in part, by Mr. Cheney's, and will prove an acceptable complement to them.
The Year-Book of the United States Department of Agriculture for 1895 is the first volume published in accordance with the law of 1895 directing the separation in the reports of the executive and business matter intended for official information and those papers formerly incorporated in them "specially suited to interest and instruct the farmers of the country." We are very glad to find that the editors have sought to make it "a concise reference book of useful information. . . without making it an encyclopædia of general information"—"to make a book and not a mere Government report." It includes a general report of the operations of the department; the papers, presented in the form of popular essays rather than of scientific reports, which are its main reason for being; and an appendix, containing a large amount of miscellaneous matter taken from the reports of the department and presented with special regard to the requirements of the reader.
In the Nineteenth Report of the Illinois State Entomologist the first article details a series of experiments for the destruction of the chinch bug. A large portion of the remainder of the work treats of the parasitic and contagious diseases of insects, and details numerous experiments for the destruction of the noxious bugs by means of infecting them with some destructive disease. The last paper deals with the white ant, which it seems annually does much damage in Illinois.
The second of the popular writings of Thomas Paine that has been reprinted from the complete works edited by Moncure D. Conway is The Age of Reason (Putnams, $1.25). In this form it makes a volume of two hundred pages, octavo. The new edition will doubtless enable many persons to learn that the book is not atheistic, as they have been told, but deistic; that it is not blasphemous, but its whole tenor is. There is one God, and He is too great and good to be charged with the ignorant and wicked acts of men that are recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Administrative Report of the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (1891, 1892) presents a historical review of the development of the plan of the work of the bureau, which from a seemingly simple beginning has been found to involve some highly complex problems, and in which many lines of investigation have been opened. Seven publications were issued during the year. The general account of the work of the agents of the bureau during the year covered by the report is followed by a general summary of the special papers which compose the larger part of the volume. These papers are: Prehistoric Textile Art in the United States, by W. H. Holmes; Stone Art, by Gerard Fowke; Aboriginal Remains in
