11 DECEMBER 1920, Page 23

ILLUSTRATED BOOKS.

MR. A. Tnonsognsr's fine work on British Mammals (Longmans, £10 10s. net), the first volume of which has appeared, while the second is to be published in the New Year, would be an admirable present for any naturalist young or old. It is to include the seventy species of mammals which inhabit or visit these islands. The first volume contains twenty-five excellent coloured repro- ductions of Mr. Thorburn's careful drawings, with short articles on the animals to the study of which he has devoted a lifetime. Six plates are given to the bate; then come the hedgehog, mole, and shrews. Next we have the wild cat, the fox, the walrus, and the seals, the otter, badger, pinemarten, stoats, weasel, squirrel, and dormouse. The text is all too brief, but it is interesting, and the accurate drawings will please every one who cares for the beasts of the field. The colour-printing is excels. tionally good.--Mr Philip Lee Warner, for the Medici Society, has reissued in a cheaper form the good modernized text of Malory's Mode Darthur (2 Vols., 42s. net), edited by Mr. A. W. Pollard and attractively illustrated in colours by Mr. Russell Flint. Malory, in this well-printed edition, is more delightful than ever.—From Messrs. Methuen comes a first-rate reprint of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter (31s. 6d. net)—a handsome quarto, with many graceful coloured drawings by the late Hugh Thonsson.-1Ve must commend, too, reprints of Kingsley's Water Babies with clever coloured drawings by A. E. Jackson. (H. Milford, 12s. 6d. net), Blackmore'e Lorna Douse, illustrated

by R. Wheelwright and W. Sewell (Harrap, 12s. 6d. net), and Dumas' The Three Musketeers, illustrated by R. Wheelwright (Harrap, 12s. 6d. net).—Cervantes' Don Quixote has been " arranged" by Mr. A. A. Methley, not without skill, and illustrated by Mr. Gordon Browne (Wells Gardner, 7s. 6d.).

Mr. Lewis Spence's Legends and Romances of Spain (Harrap, 21s. net) is extremely readable, and the illustrations by Mr. 0. McCannell are full of spirit. Mr. Spence takes the old Spanish stories of the Cid, Roderick, Amadia de Gaul, Palmerin and other heroes, the ballads and the Moorish romances, and sum- marizes them in an agreeable fashion. He devotes his last chapter to Don Quixote, Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzman de Alfarache.—Mr. Rothfeld's Women of Indict (Simpkin, Mar- shall, 30s. net) is an instructive book by an old civilian with forty-eight coloured plates of Indian women of various ranks and races by Mr. H. V. Dhurandhar. The author in his closing pages discusses the evil effect of the caste system on Indian women and the bitter prejudice which prevents most Indian girls from receiving even an elementary education. The women's ignorance of the rudiments of sanitation, for example, accounts for the heavy child-mortality in India.