(1) Birds and Beasts of the, Greek Anthology (2) Nature in the Age of Louis XIV (3) Tableau de Lilliput ou Essai sur les Infusoires

Abstract

(1) MR. NORMAN DOUGLAS has found in the famous collection of poems known as the Greek Anthology about six hundred references to wild animals, and to about a hundred and fifty different kinds. He discusses many examples in his scholarly way and with a pleasant wit; and his book is of interest in its disclosure of the mood in which many different minds looked at familiar animals through the long stretch of time which the Anthology covers. There are references to lions and lynxes, bears and boars, wolves and goats, but most of them are so trivial that we welcome the long-standing puzzle of the unicorn. Birds are happily represented by the eagle,th raven,the crow, and many others, but rarely with any insight, so far as we can discover from the quotations; and we are glad to come to the long-lived phænix and the elusive halcyon. The interest is often not so much that of natural history or of poetry, but the ‘kanthologous’ fascination of thorny questions. Reptiles are represented by adders and asps, geckos and crocodiles; and amp hibians by the vocal tree-toad or ololygon and the common frog—“the muse of damp retreat.”

(1) Birds and Beasts of the, Greek Anthology.

By Norman Douglas. Pp. vii + 215. (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1928.) 7s. 6d. net.

(2) Nature in the Age of Louis XIV.

By Phyllis E. Crump. Pp. xv + 224. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1928.) 10s. 6d. net.

(3) Tableau de Lilliput ou Essai sur les Infusoires.

Par Marcel Roland. (Collection de La Grande Revue.) Pp. 51. (Paris: Les éditions Rieder, 1928.) 6 francs.