boat's crew, thrown on the naked shore, might accomplish; and the Railroad administrations should, on any threatening of war, be advised to keep on different points a small supply of rails and sleepers to provide for any accidental breach. The only portion of this important means of defence that would involve any serious expense is the finishing, or rather completing, of the coast line from Dorchester to Exeter. We know not whether any private company would, in the present state of railway matters, undertake this without some special encouragement-but there can be no doubt that the Government should lose no time in insuring, by its countenance at least, its early completion. The distance is about fifty miles, and the engineering, we suppose, not very easy; but the work is. so necessary in a national as well as a local point of view, that it must be done sooner or later-and, of course, the sooner the better. Plymouth, Torbay, Portland, Portsmouth, Brighton, Dover, Chatham, and Sheerness, and, we may add, London, would then be brought into direct communication; and the garrisons which the Duke of Wellington contemplates in five of those places would all be, as it were, fingers of the same hand. Sir Francis Head cannot be more convinced than we are of both the formidable military power of France and the unreasonable yet deep-rooted hatred which has been unfortunately generated in that country against us; nor of the necessity of preparing ourselves for the possible results of that hostility; though we differ so essentially from the views he takes both of the symptoms of the danger and of the remedy. It is indeed our sense of the real danger and our anxiety for a practical remedy that have induced us to combat at such length Sir Francis Head's various propositions, some of which, we think, are too slight to support arguments, and others too vast and too vague to satisfy the common sense of the country. If, in the heat of discussion, the sharpness of the author's own style has given our observations anything of reaction, we hope he will at least accept the repeated assurance of our personal respect for his talents and his motives—which are, we are convinced, as honest as our own. his ERRATUM. Q. R., No. 174, p. 402, 1. 2, for When huge elephants, &c.,' read When huge mammoths, with their thick hides, braved an excessive climate, as Humboldt and Lyell have suggested; whilst they lived upon the northern birch and pine, as Owen has demonstrated from the structure of their teeth.' THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. 1.-1. Ornamental and Domestic Poultry; their History and Management. By the Rev. Edmund Saul Dixon, M.A., Rector of Intwood-with-Keswick, Norfolk. 2nd edition. 1850. 2. Poultry: their Breeding, Rearing, Diseases, and General Management. By Walter B. Dickson. 1838. 3. Farming for Ladies; or, a Guide to the Poultry-yard, the Dairy, and Piggery. By the Author of British Husbandry. 1844. 4. The Poultry-yard: a Practical View of the best Method of Selecting, Rearing, and Breeding the various Species of Domestic Fowl. By Peter Boswell. 1845. 5. Domestic Fowl; their Natural History, Breeding, Rearing, and General Management. By H. D. Richardson. Dublin, 1846. 6. A Treatise on the Breeding, Rearing, and Fattening of Poultry. By James Main, A.L.S. 4th edition. 1847. 7. Ornamental, Aquatic, and Domestic Fowl, and Game Birds; their Importation, Breeding, Rearing, and General Management. By J. J. Nolan. Dublin, 1850. F all the branches of natural history which relate to the inferior creatures, ornithology is perhaps the most elegant and the most interesting. It is true that some species among the beasts are endued with higher powers of intelligence, and are available for more general purposes of usefulness than any birds, and therefore must be allowed to put forth the prior claim on the attention of the wise; but their range both of element and geographical space is more limited; there is less ideality about the mode of life they are constrained to adopt; they are rarely supplied with brilliant colouring, unless when, as in the baboons, it seems intended to make them still more odious; their voices are not such that man can eagerly listen to them with continuous pleasure; and though they display many amiable and attractive traits of character, still it may be said that with them what we should call the evil passions are fiercer and more predominant, while the softer graces of temper and disposition are displayed in less abundant measure than amongst the feathery VOL. LXXXVIII. NO. CLXXVI. feathery tribes. They are indeed in some respects more nearly related to us;-the orang-otan at the Zoological Gardens, if suddenly converted into soapstone, would exactly correspond with the usual effigy of a Chinese mandarin. This is no recommendation: a certain amount of dissimilarity and inequality promotes friendship, and even love. But among the birds are to be found families whose decorations, alike graceful and gorgeous, are inimitable by any material that we are acquainted with, be it even gems and metals; whose song by its mere tone moves the listener almost to tears, although he is ignorant of the exact sentiment that inspires the melodist. Some, as the raven, are absolutely cosmopolitan in their dispersion throughout the climates of our planet. The four departments of material nature popularly styled elements seem open and accessible to them-earth, air, water, and (if we remember the account of the Australian kingfishers given by Mr. Gould, and of the region in which they dwell by Captain Sturt) fire almost, or heat as hot as fire. The fiend himself, when started on his ill-intentioned cruise into chaos, could scarcely display a wider range of locomotive and habitative powers. 'At last, his sail-broad vans He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke Uplifted spurns the ground; thence many a league, O'er bog, or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.' Nor are there wanting, to promote our sympathy, the qualities of acute perception, docility, mimicry, even fun and humour, courage, gallantry, strong affections-above all, parental love. What community of feeling can we enter into with a fish?a creature that increases its kind with little or no experience of the delights of mutual and parental affection; - brings forth by thousands and hundreds of thousands at a time;-eats its own progeny indiscriminately with those of its neighbour, showing no favour to either, just as they are arriving at the most interesting stages of their youth;-that indulges a voracious appetite without, as far as physiologists can judge, enjoying the pleasures of taste;-that dozes, indeed, now and then, but never seems to know what a comfortable night's rest is, though it may be torpid for a whole winter;-that has a chance, especially if it be cartilaginously constituted, of living for centuries, and yet is liable to be snapped up by its own greatgrandfather without a moment's warning! No; we cannot understand the life-theory and practice of these races, and probably never should, even were the depths of the ocean penetrated for our accommodation accommodation by a glass tunnel, through the transparent walls of which we might behold the meteoric ribbon-fishes glancing athwart their secret abyss, and practise an espionage upon the soles and turbots as they were sliding, unhurt by the enormous pressure and unsuspicious of a Paul Pry, over the surface of the profoundest mud. Look into the eyes of many beasts and many birds, and there is something which you can understand, something which seems inclined to meet your thoughts halfway, if it could but find a common language; but the only thing which the eye of a fish ever appears to express is 'I would eat you if I could.' The dervish who possessed the power of throwing his soul into other animals, might know tolerably well how to proceed when his transmigratory fancies led him to animate a bird or a beast; but on entering any of the finny tribes he would be utterly at a loss. Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the sea hide thee! Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold; Thou hast no speculation in those eyes Which thou dost glare with!' We would altogether decline the acquaintance of fish, so long as they are in the flesh. Afterwards, it is all very well to have a levee of them waiting upon us at Blackwall, instead of our attending them in less comfortable reaches of the estuary. Sweet is the hum of bees, dire is the song of gnats and mosquitos; gaudy is the clothing of the butterfly, noisome the contact of vermin; costly are the products of the silkworm and the cochineal; ruinous the ravages of the weevil, the wireworm, and the locust. But in this favoured country-and how few of us reflect on the blessings peculiar to our position-not least our ignorance of what either a hot or a cold climate really is!-in this physically happy land, compared with many other regions, insects exist in but a contemptible minority. We have fewer entomological beauties and, Heaven be praised!-fewer entomological plagues; whereas in ornithology we are rich beyond our fair proportion. It is true that we have after all plenty of insects even here; but the extreme minuteness and unimaginable variety and transformations of those creatures forbid the enterprise of most ordinary students; and when we have learned their forms, we cannot comprehend or even scarcely guess at their senses-their inner mode of life. It is doubtful whether they possess the faculty of hearing. An intelligent bee-master and good gardener says that he fired off a gun close to a hive containing a swarm; they only stirred slightly; but shaking them disturbs them much more than any noise' (Wighton on Bees, p. 59). If they do hear at all, z 2 their their scale of audible sounds has been conjectured to lie far at the top of ours, and so to be a nullity for our ears from the highest to the lowest note which it contains. The kind of sight that must be the result of looking out through a thousand microscopes is difficult for us to realize; the language of the antennæ is more untranslatable than any cuneiform inscription. For bees, and a few others of their class, there will ever be a genuine fellow-feeling, as well as a selfish interest arising from considerations of profit; but the mob of creeping things will secure no hold on popularity. As to conchology, as seen in museums and cabinets, what is it but a collection of husks and rinds of things that are dead and gone? We treasure the envelope, having lost the letter; the book is destroyed, and we preserve the binding. Not one person in a hundred, who decorates his apartment with shells, can tell whether the living creatures they once contained had eyes or no eyes, were fixed to the rock or drifted with the sea-weed, were purely herbivorous, or, by an insinuating but unamiable process, dieted on the vitals of other mollusks their neighbours. The Radiata and the rest of their allied tribes are still less inviting to men and women in general, since they puzzle and worry even philosophers and practised naturalists. We believe that Mr. Charles Darwin has been for some time past engaged upon the barnacles, and has been well nigh driven to despair by the slipperiness of their character. So that we still return to our proposition, affirming the supreme attractions which ornithology has to offer. For what is a menagerie without the birds? What a farm-yard without the poultry? What a dinner without the winged game, or their sufficient deputy? But then, how to indulge a taste for ornithology? In museums, or in books? Both of course are useful; but the best of either, when most wanted on the spur of the moment, are accessible to but few. The large building which stands at the back of Montague Place and fronts nowhere, never travels up and down the country like Mr. Wombwell's collection, or the American floating treasuries of natural and artistic objects. And the price of Mr. Gould's admirable works, such as 'The Birds of Europe' and 'The Birds of Australia 'the one 761. 8s., and the other something like 1207. -is against their purchase by most provincial libraries and bookclubs-quite as much as the cost of Mr. Yarrell's excellent British Birds' and 'British Fishes' stops their taking a place on the parlour shelves of many who would like to have such pleasant handbooks within reach. Still these last can be consulted at almost every literary institution in the kingdom, and plenty of cheaper and less con prehensive works are continually reprinted. For one great charm com |