Book Reviews

Abstract

THIS is the last of a series of eight convenient handbooks covering the whole field of agricultural study. Dr. Masters's “Plant Life on the Farm” is ably followed by the excellent little book from the pen of Prof. Brown; and what may at first appear in the light of omissions in a treatise upon animal life as seen upon farms is at once corrected by the previously-published account of the live stock of the farm. Thus, while the subject of crops of the farm and live stock of the farm were ably treated, there was still room for more purely scientific writers, such as Dr. Masters and Prof. Brown, to treat of life more as biologists than as practical farmers. Accordingly, what is true of life on the farm is in many respects true of life in the forest and life in the city; but this does not detract from the value of facts about life wherever it may be found. It was probably an agreeable task to the writer to put this little volume together. It is full of matter with which he is very familiar, and which he is able to present with that admirable clearness and precision which has always characterised both his oral and written teaching. Commencing with the two opposite conditions of life, and death, as abstractions, we are pleasantly led to the consideration of the beginnings of life in the egg, and by a natural progress to a popular, but at the same time accurate, description of tissues, organs, and functions, which carry the reader through about two-thirds of the book. The remaining third is devoted to the peculiarities of domesticated animals, and in fact becomes more thoroughly specialised upon the farm. The variability, the precocity, the delicacy, the plasticity of domesticated animals are each dealt with by a master hand, and illustrated by examples taken from the experience of breeders and our great agricultural societies.