POPULAR NATURAL HISTORY.
The Haunters of the Silences. By Charles G. D. Roberts. With many Illustrations and Decorations by Charles Livingston Bull. (Duckworth and Co. 6s. net.)—It is hardly necessary to recom- mend The Haunters of the Silences to any who have made them- selves acquainted with Mr. Charles Roberts's charming and vivid writings about animals. When so much trash is published under the name of " Nature-books," an author who really has knowledge deserves to be specially mentioned. Mr. Roberts knows the wild life of New Brunswick intimately. The beasts in his pages are living, and he compels us to believe that he describes their habits and feelings truthfully. We share the emotions of the white bear, the moose, the lynx, the beaver, perhaps even of the shrew. It is more difficult to do so in the stories of the salmon or the shark; but each of these eighteen stories calls up a whiff of the wilderness or the sea. Mr. Roberts's style is sometimes a little flowery, and adjectives are freely sprinkled about. But it is effective, and there is no one who can describe a fight between men, or between beasts, or beast and man, as he does. He sees Nature as she appears to mankind, and to our eyes she seems bloody and cruel. It may be otherwise to the beasts. The fight between the polar bear and the narwhal in "A Duel in the Deep" is awful. The fight of the trapper Logan with a pack of wolves in "On the Night Trail" is hardly less fearful. But most blood- curdling of all is the struggle of the diver and the monstrous cuttle-fish in "The Terror of the Sea Caves." Here for once Mr. Roberts transports us from Northern wilds and pine-woods to Singapore and the coast of Java. It was, we should have thought, scarcely necessary to emphasise the fact, as Mr. Roberts does in his preface, "that the actions of animals are governed not only by instinct but, also, in varying degree, by processes essentially akin to those of human reason." No observers of animals can doubt that they have reasoning-power, though many persons impute to them human motives of which they are innocent. Mr. Roberts's book is illustrated with the usual extremely clever and effective drawings by Mr. Charles Livingston Bull, which betray the influence of Japanese art.
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