Bird Notes Afield

UPON the publication of a new volume on birds by Mr. Charles A. Keeler, readers of scientific bent, nature-lovers, admirers of good literature, and especially all who find both sensuous and spiritual delight in the woods and their denizens, are to be congratulated. The author's scientific reputation, and the recent splendid vindication of his earlier work against hostile criticism, are a guaranty of accuracy as to the facts presented, most of them based on Mr. Keeler's own and painstaking observations. The volume is sure, therefore, to find a place in every considerable library and among the books of both specialists and amateurs in science.

It is a satisfaction to local patriotic sentiment to find Mr. Keeler vindicating California as regards the alleged dearth of songbirds here. From almost every page, indeed, the echo of bird-song greets the reader. But, in addition to this, Mr. Keeler expressly controverts the error. Thus he says:

There is a superstition, unfortunately all too prevalent, that our birds do not sing. The truth of the matter is that our ears do not hear, or rather, that our attention is directed to other things. We talk of importing singing birds from far-off lands at the same time that we calmly permit many of our own beautiful songsters to be exterminated. It is well for people to learn to appreciate what they have before desiring to add to their possessions. Does the robin sing in the elms of New England? In the pines and redwoods of California he sings the same dear old song. Does the meadowlark make glad the plowed fields of Illinois with his whistle? Here he sings a fuller and richer tune. To be sure we do not know the ecstatic song of the bobolink, but the linnet sings here a strain that is quite as vivacious and with a sweeter melody. Bullock's oriole sounds his ringing notes as bravely with us as the more famed but no

inore lovely Baltimore oriole does about New York, and so on throughout the list. (Page 10.)

This from such an authority should be accepted as expert testimony and as probably decisive evidence on the mooted question.

Every true lover of the woodlands of California must feel under personal obligations to the author for opening the way to a more intimate and appreciative association with her birds. We use the word association advisedly, because it expresses what Mr. Keeler's method exemplifies. He does not merely observe the birds and record, in the set forms of science, their characteristics and habits, but he truly associates with them, lives with them, seems to catch their very thoughts and to understand the motives and meanings of their procedure in what to them must stand for that which we call "the conduct of life." Indeed, the book is vivified and distinctly enriched by repeated and very charming comparisons, even almost identifications of bird-deeds and human-deeds; certain actions of theirs being traced to reasonings and sentiments similar to those which move us. The reader could not afford to have these paragraphs removed from the book.

It is only in their habitats and as they are about their own and chosen business, of course, that birds can be successfully studied:

To know the birds we must see them in their native haunts-on the ocean, about the shores, in the sage-brush and the pine woods. (p. 10.)

Again, speaking of the mountain-quail and the valley-quail:

To know these birds in the market, hung up with limp bodies and ruffled plumage, is a very different matter from an acquaintance

with them in their native haunts, breathing the same sweet air of the pine woods that they breathe, and feeling the same thrill of spring life. (p. 146.)

One welcome result of this companionable and sympathetic association with birds at home-in their home-is that it enables the author to trace, in many an exquisite passage, the nature-setting of bird-life. Take the following in the chapter on "March in the Pine Woods," as an instance:

What days of joy are these, when the treesquirrels are barking and chuckling over their love-making, when the salmon are spawning in the mountain brooks, and the birds are crowding back to their old nesting-places! One by one the spring flowers push their tender green shoots through the woodland mold-the hound's-tongue with its clusters of blue stars; the fair, pale, dogtoothed violets, and the trilium. The mountain-quail sounds its loud, restless, whistling titter from the high-lands, the valley-quail crows below it, and away up among the pine-trees a grouse is booming its love call. (p. 146.)

We have expressed, at the beginning, our estimate of the scientific value of this book. This is, of course, of primary importance, in modern times, in any book that deals with life in nature the lack of reliableness in the record of facts and the explication of them would be fatal. Our concern, however, in the present instance, is far more with the literary form and quality of this essay with which Mr. Keeler again enters into the world not only of science but of letters. We desire to record the conviction that in the present and the future work of this young author the world will recognize a quality of which the Pacific Coast may well be proud.

We must remember that the task attempted in this volume is one of great difficultynamely, that of producing a work at once technically accurate and beautiful in style. It means much, accordingly, that the reader of Bird Notes Afield is moved at once to compare it with similar work of John Burroughs. Burroughs is now advanced in years and the exquisite perfection of his performance is the fruit of maturity and long application to chosen tasks. Mr. Keeler is at the beginning of his career. If he addresses himself to his undertakings with like care and industry, and broods day and night over Nature's wondrous story, the promise is that the coming years will bring him an enviable reputation and place him in a front rank among

writers on such themes as he is now attempting. In preparing this work he has given himself time, and has proved himself sufficently receptive to take bird-melody and color and the environments of bird-life into his mind and heart, and the result is that in many a phrase and sentence and paragraph, he not only writes as a faithful recorder of what he observes, but sings also as a poet. In verification of this estimate we append the following extracts:

At sunset the cicada is sounding his high, palpitating love call from the meadow, when suddenly, out of the sacred calm of evening, full and rich and varied as the tones of an organ, swells the song of a thrush. The most inspired singer of all, with his rich, gurgling fullness of rapturous sound, has waited until all the lesser minstrels have done their part in the day's chorus, and now from his bush in the thicket, as the shadows darken around him, he becomes infused with the subtle delight of the sunset sky, the sweet odors of the evening and the cool air of the night. "Qui, qui, qui, quia, quia, quia," he sings, with his little throat shaking and trembling with the resonant quality of the sound. Well can he afford to be clad in olive and brown, relieved only by the white speckled breast, with such wealth of song at his command! His whole composition is too delicately attuned to admit of showy colors. Notice his large, bright eye, his long, slender legs and delicate beak, his half-calm, halftimid manners as he stands upon a twig in the obscurity of the foliage. He is a creature apart from the vulgar throng that surround him, and the exclusiveness of his hours of song shows that he is not unconscious of his superiority. (pp. 174, 175.)

In this region during the midsummer season, when the fog hangs in an almost perpetual curtain over San Francisco Bay and the land adjacent to it, it is a delight to slip away among the secluded redwood groves and see what the birds are about-to lie in the dark shade of foliage and watch the play of life in the branches overhead-to stand by the stream where a mother sandpiper is leading her nimble young along the pebbled shore, and where the trout flashes in the silver stream as the kingfisher, with ominous rattle, flies overhead. Here all is beautiful! The sunlight filtering through the tracery of drooping boughs is transmuted to a flaming rose color, glowing amid the cool greens and the purple shadows that invest it. (p. 181.)

Evening brings its own wonders, when the bats fly mysteriously out of the gloom, and the chimney-swifts, with fluttering, corkscrew flight, come winging above us with their chattering calls. We stand in the solemn twilight with the gigantic primeval trees looming above us, the shadows deepening beneath, and the breath of the night whispering far overhead, almost oppressed

by the sacred beauty, the awful calm, of one of nature's holiest temples. (p. 193.)

Elder & Shepard, of San Francisco, are to be credited with enterprise in bringing out this valuable book, and with exceptional good taste in their choice of type-face, paper, and binding.

Dionysos and Immortality

FROM a perusal of this little volume by President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, one is inclined to expect that the students of the University of California will be incited henceforth to a new interest in certain old and almost forgotten lines of thought and research. Chemistry and geology, mining and engineering, political economy and commerce, belles lettres and modern languages, law and medicine, and all the other up-todate studies of the U. C. curriculum are likely to be crowded up a little in order to make room for Greek antiquities of thought and life. President Wheeler at the outset, in declaring a natural new-born affection for California, confessed to an earlier interested regard for "his beloved Hellas," and this will undoubtedly bear fruit of thought here as it has in the East.

Anticipating a ready audience on the Pacific Coast for what President Wheeler has to say about Greece-her people and her thought-the Eastern publishers have promptly sent hither his " Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man," given this year at Harvard University. Therein is given a brief review of the Greek belief in life after death. The reader finds the subject to be in the grasp of a comprehending mind, skilled in the massing of many and diversified facts, in grouping them symmetrically and logically, in giving them rational explication, and in setting forth the results in a style at once elegant and lucid.

To the student of comparative religion and to those who hunger for the life after death, President Wheeler's subject is of profound interest. In elucidating it, he passes in review the primitive faith, shared by the early Greeks, in a soul separable from the body, and destined for conscious, and presumably contented existence hereafter. In the Homeric poems this faith has become joyless, contemplating only a shadowy and altogether unsatisfactory future. But with the period of Greek colonial and commercial expansion, -750 to 650 B. C.-came a re-energizing of

Greek thought and life, characterized especially by the rise of individualism. This gives the author his special theme-" The Greek Faith in Immortality as Affected by the Rise of Individualism." He finds in this age a revival, in a new form, of the early and This simple Greek faith in immortality. was fostered by the cult of the dramatic Eleusinian mysteries and especially by the grafting into them of the Dionysos worship. The rise of Dionysos worship is held by President Wheeler to be "the most important single phenomenon in the history of Greek religion." Its problem was to deliver men from the commonplace by an ecstasy through which they should realize their own triumphant spiritual being allying them with the divine. It "infused a new life into the dead formalism of religion, quickened and energized the entire intellectual and spiritual life of Greece to the very finger-tips. It was the religion of enthusiasm." It reawakened the expectation of a continued personal existence after death, and finally opened the way for Plato "to offer the first philosophic argument for the immortality of the soul."

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Thus, President Wheeler believes, did Greece and Dionysos prepare for the day when men learned through the Convincing Love to know and live the eternity within them."

Juvenile Books for the Holidays

Messrs. Lee & Shepard, Doubleday & McClure, Dodd, Mead & Co., and other publishers are competing with Santa Claus in the production of holiday surprises, in the shape of most fascinating books for young folk. It is a joy only to touch the beautiful bindings and exquisite paper. The one lapse from good book-making taste is the general inferiority of the illustrations, especially in the books designed for boys. Many of these pictures hint of the "blood-and-thunder " and heavy-villain" type, and are executed in a stiff and inartistic manner. When one considers the susceptibiltiy of young people to lifelike representations whether of persons or things, and the present availability of good illustrators, it seems a pity to neglect this factor of youthful education.

The marked preponderance of those juvenile books whose appeal is directly to the boyish liking confirms the impression that it is harder to find material to suit the girlish taste, and many more works of battle and

adventure are issued than those carried out on milder lines. Nevertheless, literary caterers to little women have more than offset this disparity by the charming, sympathetic quality of their work, which can be put into girls' stories only by the loving writers of their own sex who have been through similar experiences incident to girlhood.

It gives a pleasant surprise, tinged with reminiscence, to see the name of Oliver Optic (W. T. Adams) on the title page of a new volume. At his death two years ago, he left the unfinished manuscript of An Undivided Union, with an outline for its completion. Edward Strathemeyer, well known as the author of the popular "Old Glory" Series, has carried out Mr. Adams' plan in creditable fashion, and the book is sure to receive unusual appreciation from thousands of Oliver Optic's admirers.

Mr. Strathemeyer has added Under Otis in the Philippines to the "Old Glory" Series, and To Alaska for Gold to his "Bound to Succeed" Series. Mr. Strathemeyer's name, in connection with these two suggestive titles, renders further praise superfluous.

In view of General O. O. Howard's popularity as a writer for boys, Henry in the War wil be taken up with pleasurable anticipation, especially by those of its readers who have already seen "Donald's School Days," in which Henry" figures conspicuously. General Howard's reputation as an author, backed by his own character and exploits, is gaining for him a growing place in the esteem of not only his youthful readers, but in that of the older people who realize his power to elevate modern literature for their children.

Camping on the St. Lawrence, and Grant Burton the Runaway, by Everett Tomlinson and W. Gordon Parker, respectively, are two refreshingly natural tales. Cattle Ranch to College, by Russell Doubleday, is another good yarn, well illustrated from photographs.

Frank S. Child's The House with Sixty Closets, is a captivating story for imaginative youngsters of both sexes, and is embellished with a profusion of creditable drawings. Told Under the Cherry Trees, by Grace LeBaron, a collection of short tales, will also appeal to both boys and girls.

Martha Finley's Elsie in the South carries on the history of Elsie's grandchildren; and Sophie May has added another welcome book

to her long list of Prudy Books," under the title of Wee Lucy's Secret.

The only thorough-going fairy tales among all the children's books that have reached us are in one little blue volume called The Return of the Fairies, by Charles J. Bellamy, brother of the late famous author of Looking Backward. The stories are original and entertaining and are daintily and fancifully illustrated.

We Four Girls, by Mary G. Darling, is a cozy little story of four school-girls who spend their summer vacation in the country, continuing their school work under a chosen teacher. It is charmingly written and illustrated.

Beck's Fortune, by Adele E. Thompson, is a girls' story of unusual merit and interest, which will be read and enjoyed by many older folk than those for whom it is primarily intended.

A tale by Amanda M. Douglas needs little recommendation to those who have read other similar works of this engaging author. Her latest book, A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia, is as quaint a narrative as the title implies, and the sweet little Quaker heroine,

Primrose," is likely to take a place among the characters in fiction who are remembered with tenderness.

Those familiar with the works of Laura E. Richards will be glad to know that Dana, Estes & Co., have brought out a new story for girls entitled Peggy, which is quite up to the usual standard of this graceful author's excellence, and is bound to please both old and young.

To boys who have an insatiate curiosity concerning railroad engineering, We Win, by Herbert E. Hamblen, will be a revelation in this field. In vivid and realistic language the author sets forth the experi ences, both commonplace and uncommon, of a railroad engineer's career. The sustained interest of the story, combined with the reliable technical information, renders the book of unusual value for young readers.

Mr. James Otis has supplied the boys with a book under the title of Messenger 48, which possesses all the requisites for a wideawake, stirring detective story, while its moral standard is above reproach. The young hero, a messenger lad, wins local fame by ferreting out the hiding-place of two notorious murderers, for which deed he is duly rewarded by his grateful townsfolk.

To

It is hard to know just where to place Mickey Finn Idylls, by Ernest Jarrold. be sure, they revolve about a boy's life and character, and will consequently attract the children; at the same time, the delicious Irish humor and bits of glowing nature description will endear the book to older readers.

No fairy tales could be quite so enchanting as Ray Stannard Baker's The Boy's Book of Inventions. This is an irresistibly fascinating work of 354 pages, embracing two hundred elegant illustrations. All the inventive wonders of the age are treated in a comprehensible and captivating manner-the automobile, submarine boat, flying machines, great kites, and so on.

The Bow-Legged Ghost

ANOTHER holiday book of readable stories has just been brought out by Leon Mead, formerly associate editor of Truth. The brief introduction is a well-devised incentive to read what follows, though unfortunately for the reader's expectations the first story in the collection-The Bow-Legged Ghost-from which the book takes its titleis the weakest of the lot. Mr. Mead shows great versatility in the selection and handling of his topics. Around the most commonplace incidents he builds up unique little romances that set us wondering why other writers have not stumbled upon the same ideas and found it worth while to elaborate them. Perhaps the best of the entire group under review is The Story of Four Carrier Pigeons, the plot of which is exceedingly original. Revels of the Muses manifests an clever equally ingenious treatment of a scheme. Mr. Mead has put his best work, however, into Fashion's Curious Lore, which deals with bygone customs and fads unfamiliar to most readers, and exhibits careful research on the part of the author. verse in Mr. Mead's book does not demon strate any unusual ability; this and the collection of jokes are on a par with the average comic paper rhyme and wit.

The

Our Islands and Their People THE most interesting opportunity now open to American travelers would undoubtedly be a series of trips to the various acquisitions of the United States in the two great oceans. These island worlds are as yet comparatively unknown, or known in a

through

desultory and imperfect way, newspaper articles published in connection with the war with Spain, and the subsequent campaign in Luzon. Americans, even that majority of them who cannot gratify the desire for foreign travel, are now afforded a chance for a thorough acquaintance with these regions-with Cuba, Porto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Philippines-through the magnificent work which the N. D. Thompson Publishing Company, of St. Louis, is now publishing. This consists of twenty-four parts, of thirty-two large quarto pages each, with various inserts, colored maps, etc., making in all a book of nearly eight hundred pages. The reader of this work will certainly be able to master a more complete knowledge of these islands than he could hope to gain even by years of travel in them. The text is admirably written and gives full and accurate accounts of the various peoples, their modes of life, customs, physical, intellectual and moral characteristics, homes, industries, etc., all graphically and circumstantially described. There is an immense fund of important information here thoroughly digested and classified for use. The photographic illustrations and colored plates are of unexcelled beauty, and are very profuse, numbering about twelve hundred. They constitute in themselves an album of pictures worth far more than the cost of the book. One marvels at the clearness and sharpness of the reproductions here presented and feels himself translated to the very scenes which they depict. No one is likely to begrudge the money which will give him possession of this book, especially since the publishers have carried out their design on a scale so ample and in a manner so painstaking and accurate as to make the work of permanent value for reference for years to come. Parts I and II are now ready, to be rapidly followed by others.

Books Received

From the Doubleday & McClure Co., New York (through Payot, Upham & Co., San Francisco) Arms and the Woman. By Harold McGrath. $1.25.

Tales of the Telegraph. By Jasper Ewing Brady. $1.25.

Stories of the Railroad. By John Alexander Hill. $1.50.

Stalky & Co. By Rudyard Kipling. $1.50. The Boy's Book of Inventions. By Ray Staunard Baker. $2.00.