A Glossary of Greek Birds

Abstract

THE first edition of this book was published forty years ago, and the author tells us that it is fully fifty since he began to write it. It is the work of a Greek scholar of wide knowledge and immense reading, as well as an expert naturalist. More, much more, than fifty years ago, he says in his preface, his father taught him that many a Greek word or name of a hero was foreign to Aryan speech. The merchant and the mariner had brought strange words home from overseas, and many a beast and bird and hill and river had kept its pre-hellenic name. Many old names of birds and fish are recorded by Italian scholars from the rich dialects of Italy, and new light is thrown hereby on obscure Greek and Latin words. A Glossary of Greek Birds By D'Arcy Wentworth Thomson. (St. Andrews University Publications, No. 39.) New edition. Pp. viii + 342. (London: Oxford University Press, 1936.) 12s. 6d. net.