Abstract
IN his preface the author, who appears to have had a very large experience in trapping vermin, states that the only natural-history works he has consulted are “Wood's Natural History” and “The Popular Encyclopaedia.” All we can say is the more's the pity, for had he undertaken a somewhat wider and more modern course of reading we might have been spared such out-of-date statements as that the hedge hog is a member of the same family as the one which includes the mole and the shrewmouse, or that there are two British species of dormice and also of water-shrews. Such errors, are possibly excusable in a writer who is not a zoologist; but what can be said of a so-called sportsman or outdoor naturalist who states that only tame red deer are hunted in England, and that wild roebuck are unknown south of Scotland?
The Balance of Nature, and Modern Conditions of Cultivation: A Practical Manual of Animal Foes and Friends, for the Country Gentleman, the Farmer, the Forester, the Gardener, and the Sportsman.
By George Abbey. Pp. xlvii + 278. (London: Routledge and Sons, Ltd.; New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1909.) Price 7s. 6d. net.
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L., R. The Balance of Nature, and Modern Conditions of Cultivation: A Practical Manual of Animal Foes and Friends, for the Country Gentleman, the Farmer, the Forester, the Gardener, and the Sportsman . Nature 81, 5 (1909). https://doi.org/10.1038/081005c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/081005c0