has hitherto been slurred over by his biographers. Hitherto, whatever attention has been given to Zélide has been subsidiary—she has depended for attention on her companion of the moment. Mr. Geoffrey Scott detaches her and places her in the front line of the scene. She becomes in his hands an individual and not an attribute.

It is true that a local Swiss historian, M. Philippe Godet, published twenty years ago a 'massive' work on her and her friends. When he did this, he had already spent twenty years in collating the records which are preserved at Neuchâtel. Mr. Scott loyally expresses his debt to M. Godet, whose volumes (of which I confess that, though much attracted by Benjamin Constant, I never before heard) are 'of primarily local interest' and 'very difficult to obtain.' They may be treated, therefore, less as a biography than as a mine of material, from which Mr. Scott has dug his ore and refined it. Let us not pretend to have read M. Godet, or to wish tọ read him.

Manuel d'histoire de Paris, by Henri Lemoine, Paris: Albin-Michel, 1925.

[Marcel Raymond in Les Nouvelles Littéraires] THE author has tried to write a simple story, a manual designed 'for students, teachers, and travelers.' He has succeeded perfectly, and it would be ungracious to find fault with him because he is a little academic in certain passages and because his style is rather bare. It was a difficult task to boil down into a single volume all the history, archæology, and topography on which we have so many documents. Each page wakens in us memories, or even brings us something not known before. This popular volume, embellished with well-chosen photographic illustrations, is destined to render some very real service.

The Menace of Colour, by J. W. Gregory, London: Seeley Service, 1925, 12s. 6d.

[Saturday Review]

PROFESSOR GREGORY has given us a most learned and valuable study of 'the difficulties due to the association of white and colored races, with an account of measures proposed for their solution, and special reference to white colonization in the tropics.' It originated as his presidential address to the Geographical Section of the British Association at Toronto last year, when it created such interest and evoked so many criticisms that there was good warrant for expanding it into this closely packed volume. The question here handled is a most important one, both for us and for the United States, where one person in every nine is colored. Professor Gregory wears his learning in most judicial fashion, and his

knowledge of African travel lends it human interest.

A Man Who Walked Alone. Letters from W. H. Hudson to Edward Garnett, London: Edward Garnett, 1925. 6s.

[Daily Herald]

THE late W. H. Hudson, who wrote better than any man or woman of our time about birds and certain aspects of scenery, was essentially a man who walked alone. Perhaps it did not need these hundred and fifty letters to prove that; and it is certainly not disproved by his statement: 'It seems to me that if I had preserved all the letters worth keeping I have received since I came to England they would now number not less than twenty thousand.' A man may receive ten times that number of letters and be lonely to the end.

Hudson gave his whole life to natural study, particularly of birds; and if, in return, he received the inward joy and peace that come to no one so bountifully as to the naturalist, he forfeited much that other men enjoy.

Now he writes from Land's End, where he is watching the return of the migrants; now from some quiet village in Wiltshire, where, resting on a tombstone, he thinks upon the past; and now he is in Norfolk, seeing just how close he can get to a flock of sand-pipers without frightening them away. But of the joys of comradeship he never writes, because he hardly knew what they were.

He naturally became, therefore, somewhat narrow in his views. When the war came, although he was annoyed that it so disturbed his accustomed routine, he could write, 'I think it is a blessed war. Let us thank the gods for a Wilhelm and a whole nation insane with hatred of England to restore us to health.' He viewed men quite objectively; and though he winced at the slightest pang of a bird, as previously as November 1913 he could say, 'I hope to stay on to see the flame of war brighten in this peacerotten land.'

This inability to join hands with his fellow creatures, this real lack of sympathy with them in their joy and their sorrow, made him conservative in his attitude - -even toward art. While he was among the first to be enthusiastic about the austere and frozen art of Doughty's Dawn in Britain, the fires and passion of the art of D. H. Lawrence only moved him to disgust.

BOOKS MENTIONED STRUTT, ROBERT JOHN. John William Strutt, third Baron Rayleigh. London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1924.