Abstract
THIS book consists of a series of pleasant dialogues between Dr. Roy Hunter and some children, at Orchard Farm in New England, in which the children learn the appearance and habits of a great number of the birds around them. It has been rather unfairly compared in a daily paper to “Sandford and Merton.” It must be allowed that the didactic dialogue is apt to be tiresome, and in this case the children are of course a little unnatural in their acuteness and their ardent desire to learn. English boys would probably learn better from a sound and scholarly handbook: one in whose hands I to-day placed Sir Humphry Davy's “Salmonia,” after a few days' trout-fishing, not unjustly complained that Halieutes and his pupils always caught exactly the fish they wanted—which was not the case when he was fishing. It may perhaps be doubted whether the experiment would answer on this side the water.
Citizen Bird: Scenes from Bird-life in plain English for Beginners.
By Mabel Osgood Wright Elliot Coues. Pp. xiv + 430. (New York: The Macmillan Company. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1897.)
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FOWLER, W. Citizen Bird: Scenes from Bird-life in plain English for Beginners. Nature 56, 516 (1897). https://doi.org/10.1038/056516a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/056516a0