Collins New Naturalist Library

Dr Ford, the author of this fascinating volume on butterflies, was an enthusiastic butterfly collector in his youth. He was not only a professional biologist of great distinction but also brought his wide knowledge of genetics and evolution to bear on the problems arising out of his collecting. Thus he was able to see butterflies both as an absorbing hobby and as part of the great panorama of biology.

The resultant book is an outstanding contribution to Natural History in the best sense of the term. Natural History is not something inferior to science – it is part of science, inviting an approach by way of field study. While, therefore, Dr Ford’s book contains a somewhat higher proportion of scientific history and technical ideas than most books on Natural History, this for the great majority of amateurs will be a stimulus rather than an obstacle, and throughout the author has kept in mind the needs of butterfly collectors and of all those who love the country in the hope that it may increase their pleasure by widening the scope of their interests.

Mr. Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald is the editor of The Field. He is also a considerable naturalist in his own right. It will be a simple matter for the reader to determine this for himself, for at every page he will discover the original observations and personal opinions of the writer.

Mt. Vesey-Fitzgerald is not only extremely well informed in the scientific aspects of the natural history of the birds and mammals with which he deals, but he is also a countryman of wide experience, a wild-fowler, Vice-President of the Gamekeepers Associstion, a friend of gypsies and we suspect of poachers.

All these things fit him well to describe the natural history of British Game and put it in a proper perspective. His book ranges beyond the strict legal interpretation of game and is full of interesting details about the birds and beasts that should interest sportsmen, and all too frequently to not. But all readers will be attracted by the author's easy flow of information on a variety of topics.

Up to now there has been no real attempt to write a comprehensive history of a great human community in terms of the animals and plants it has displaced, changed, moved and removed, introduced, conserved, lost or forgotten. In selecting London as an area for such study Mr. Fitter, himself a Londoner, takes the world’s largest aggregation of human beings living in a single community and in many ways the most interesting perhaps of all regions of the British Isles, and shows how the spread of man’s activities has affected the plants and animals in them, destroying some, creating others.

Wild birds like the rook and jackdaw have been driven further from St. Paul’s by the relentless advance of London’s tide of bricks, others like the woodpigeon and moorhen have moved in to colonise those oases of greenery, the parks. The influence of international trade has brought many new creatures to the Port of London, most of them undesirable.

It would be difficult to find an area of comparable size anywhere in the world with such a variety of physical conditions, scenery and consequently of plant and animal life as the British Isles. Our homeland is indeed a geological museum, epitomising in miniature the geological history of the globe. Each hill and valley, each plateau and plain reflects the underlying geological structure or build; this volume attempts not only to describe the surface features, but also to sketch the long and complex series of events which have given the land its present form – the building of the British Isles. It thus deals with the physical background, the stage on which the drama of life is played and which provides the fundamental environment for plants, animals and man.

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland are rugged moorland, alpine mountains and jagged coast with remarkable natural history, including relict and specialised animals and plants. Here are animals in really large numbers: St. Kilda with its sea-birds, North Rona its seals, Islay its wintering geese, rivers and lochs with their spawning salmon and trout, the ubiquitous midges! This is big country with red deer, wildcat, pine marten, badger, otter, fox, ermine, golden eagle, osprey, raven, peregrine, grey lag, divers, phalaropes, capercaillie and ptarmigan. Off-shore are killer whales and basking sharks. Here too in large scale interaction is forestry, sheep farming, sport, tourism and wild life conservation.

Britain's neglect of fungi as table delicacies has perhaps been responsible for our surprising ignorance of the natural history of such fascinating plants. Puff-balls, more than a foot in diameter; mouls in jam-pots; dry rot; truffles; these are examples of the wide range of the Group, comprising over 100,000 species.

Many are of economic importance – for example, the rusts that attack wheat and other crops, and the yeasts which ferment beer – and there are others of great biological interest, such as the mycorrhizal fungi which live in association with the roots of forest trees, orchids and other plants, and help them to absorp food from the soil. Penicillin, of course, has become a household word, and this book's final chapter on the industry is one of the best short accounts of the subject yet writtern.

Dr. Ramsbottom was for many years Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum, and has devoted his life to the study of fungi in all their aspects. He is equally at home in the field, the laboratory and the library. One of the special features of Mushrooms and Toadstools is the wealth of historical allusion to fungi extracted from old books.

Set out in a style reminiscent of Robert Burton, this colume can truly be described as a 20th century "Anatomy of Toadstool." Indeed, in fairy rings, science and superstition have gone hand in hand to produce a lively story of alternating surmise and research – and even today a full and final explanation of these mysterious rings has not yet been made.

Many of the larger toadstools are brightly coloured and lend themselves admirably to colour photography, as shown by the 80 remarkable illustrations by Mr Paul de Laszlo.

This volume deals with the natural history of British insects, and introduces the reader to some of the latest discoveries and ideas about them. The author has brought together within convenient compass a large amount of scientific knowledge, often of absorbing interest; and he describes many of the remarkable features associated with the lives of insects.

Only limited treatment is given to butterflies and moths, since there are several excellent books on these insects that are readily accessible, including Dr Ford's volume on Butterflies in the New Naturalist. When it comes to other insects, beetles, two-winged flies, plant-bugs, bees, lace-wings and the like, it is much less easy to find out much about them. Books on such insects are few and far between, and most of them are rather technical in character.

An increasing number of people are interested in the insects of our countryside, and this book is intended to fill at least some of their needs. It will increase their pleasure in observing the creatures with which it deals and may, perhaps, induce some of its readers to become independent observers. There is a great field to be explored by anyone who is drawn to look beneath the mere surface and study in detail any of the very commonest of our insects, no matter to what groups the latter may belong.

One of the special features of the book is the large number of colour photographs of different aspects of insect life. Almost all of these were taken by Mr. Beaufoy from the living insects. Mr. Beaufoy is an outstanding expert in nature photography. There are forty coloured plates, of which only seven were taken from dead and 'set' specimens.

The author is well-known in the world of biologists. Until recently he held the important post of Reader in Entomology at Cambridge. He has written several leading text books on entomology.

The natural history of an ordinary English country parish was one of the first subjects that suggested themselves when the New Naturalist series was planned. Being chiefly farmland and therefore practically all man-made, most country parishes are extremely complex from the naturalist’s point of view and also inevitably contain a vast amount of human history. Any attempt to describe their plants and animals has to be closely related with the ways of man himself, who must be regarded as the chief element in the community – a fact which has been obvious enough to naturalists ever since the days of Gilbert White. For this book we are fortunate to have found an author who combines a thorough all-round knowledge of natural history with a sound insight into human customs, history, pastimes and farming methods. Arnold Boyd has lived in Cheshire all his life – since 1902 in the parish of Antrobus, part of the old parish of Great Budworth, the character of which is typical of much of the Cheshire Plain. In keeping with the best tradition of English amateur naturalists, he excels as a collector of facts, as has been apparent from his previous books, his writing in the Manchester Guardian and other journals, and in his assistant editorship of British Birds. By weaving together his collection of facts he presents us with a book of remarkable unity and which shows a wide grasp of every aspect of the living communities. This charming yet erudite portrait will protect his beloved parish forever from the ravages of human forgetfulness.

Moorland, mountain-top and upland grazing occupy over a third of the total living-space of the British Isles, and, of all kinds of land, have suffered least interference by man. Mountains and moorlands provide the widest scope for studying natural wild life on land.

Professor Pearsall died in 1964. This new edition has been revised by his friend and pupil, Winifred Pennington. The book remains an invaluable introduction to the upland regions of Britain – their structure, climate, vegetation and animal life, their present and past uses and the problems of their conservation for the future.

There is a greater variety of plants and animals to be found in a small section of the sea shore than in any other comparable area. This is due mainly to the zoning of life in relation to depth below the surface, partly to the effect of the tides, and partly to the radically different habitats provided by rock, sand and mud.

In addition, many large groups are wholly or almost wholly marine, so that it is only on the sea shore that the ordinary man and woman can make acquaintance with them. Thus all the Echinoderms, the sea-urchins, star-fish, brittle-stars and sea-cucumbers are confined to salt water; the entire class of tunicates with the sea squirts and salps; almost all the Bryozoa and the jelly-fish; all the corals, and sea-anemones; all the octopus and cuttlefish; nearly all the red and all the brown seaweeds. Many other groups show much greater variety of marine than of freshwater or land forms – for instance the crustacean, the fish, the bivalve and gastropod molluscs, and various groups of worms. On the other hand, the insects, so ubiquitous elsewhere, are almost entirely absent from salt water.

The natural history of the sea shore is thus the best possible introduction to a general knowledge of the animal and plant kingdom, with the exception of the few highest groups; and it also affords an almost diagrammatic introduction to ecological study with its demonstration of the way in which the types of animals and plants are modified to suit different environments.

The study of life in British lakes and rivers is one of that has been unduly neglected in natural history publications. Dr. Macan and Dr. Worthington are particularly well equipped to provide the readers of the New Naturalist series with a work that is both authoritative and of outstanding interest, since for many years they have been connected with the freshwater biological station of Wray Castle at Windermere in the English Lakes.

It has long been emphasized by teachers of ecology that the intricacies of the animal and plant community as a whole can be readily studied in a pond or lake. This is made admirably clear by the authors. The solutions to the many problems, which form the observation of life in lakes and rivers, have themselves created other absorbing problems, wider and more fundamental than perhaps ever suspected, and which reach far into the very structure of biology.

In spite of its importance, the majority of the public know surprisingly little about the subject. Anglers know only one side of it; holiday makers mostly skim the surface if it. Dr. Macan and Dr. Worthington now reveal to us not only the fascination of the world of fresh waters, but the excitement and delight of finding out more about it.

Few areas can boast so many rare and beautiful wild flowers as those of the chalk and limestone. Few areas, too, have so much lovely scenery in which to search them out. Mr. Lousley’s vivid and authoritative presentation of his subject shows that he has made full use of these opportunities. His special affection is for the woods and chalk downs of south-eastern England, of which he has a knowledge almost unsurpassed.

Nevertheless, in this book he has also given us an admirable survey of all the important limestone regions in the country from the Devonian formation at Berry Head to the oolite of the Cotswolds and the great carboniferous stretches of the north. This book will urge many to follow in the author’s footsteps in search of the rich flora which make our chalk downs and limestone cliffs so fascinating to explore.

This, the first book on birds in the New Naturalist main series, is undoubtedly one of the most important contributions to the literature of British ornithology of recent years. Its subject is the impact of civilisation upon our bird life, with particular reference to the species that have come to rely largely on types of habitat greatly modified or actually formed by human action. Mr. Nicholson is already well known to many for his popularisation of the scientific study of birds as a means of their protection, and it is not surprising, therefore, that this volume should also be concerned with the ways in which birds and men can live happily together.

Readers will be delighted by his combination of the aesthetic approach with serious criticism, and particularly by the note of optimism in the book – the suggestion that not all the works of man are fated to destroy nature, and that some of them are likely to improve the quality and variety of our birds. From the ornithological point of view, we have an interesting half-century before us. It is extremely probable that at the end of it BIRDS AND MEN will still be widely read, and quarried for facts and conclusions by the next generation of naturalists.

Now published in ebook format, with a complete set of new distribution maps from the Atlas of the British Flora, this beautiful book remains the standard work in its subject, a treasure for all lovers of wild plants. Dr. Dummerhayes, in charge of the orchid collection at Kew from 1924 to 1964, looks at our fifty-odd species in relation to the vast orchid family throughout the world, discusses their general biology and natural history in Britain, gives a detailed account of all our orchid species, varieties and hybrids, and provides a useful key to identification.

The colour photographs represent every known British species with the exception of Orchis cruenta and O. occidentalis.

From Chaucer’s sweet April showers to the peasoupers of Sherlock Holmes the British scene cannot be contemplated without climate entering in. In this book Professor Manley shows us the best and worst of our much-maligned climate. He traces the subtle influence of sunshine and cloud, of dew, mist, rain, hail and snow, of heat and cold on the changing scene through the seasons. We often apologise for our climate, but in many ways it is the best in the world. No great extremes of heat of cold, no dreaded droughts, no destructive hurricanes, yet a marked seasonal rhythm with lots of little surprises. The richness of plant and animal life, the extremely high productivity of our farmlands, the fleeting beauties of our landscape – all are closely linked with Britain’s climate.

It may justly be claimed that this is the first book to attempt scientifically to trace these intimate yet elusive relationships.

Britain's coasts have everything, from towering cliffs rising sheer from deep water to a thousand feet and more, to miles of tidal slobs and flats, restless shingle spits, shifting beaches, immobile rock headlands. The extraordinary consequences of a varied climate and a complicated geology are shown even more effectively in Britain's coasts than in her fascinating island scenery.
Our greatest authority on coastal topography, Professor Steers, has studied the nature of Britain's sea-side and the evolution of coasts and coastline for most of his life. A past Professor of Geography of Cambridge University, he made the now famous comprehensive survey of our entire coastline. His book shows in a persuasive and compelling way the origin and evolution of cliffs, estuaries, sea marshes, sand dunes and the communities of plants and animals that they support.

The loneliest wilderness in England. This has been said more often of Dartmoor than any other part of our country. Traditionally in the world of fiction as well as that of fact, Dartmoor has been renowned as a vast empty moorland area, the property of nature rather than of man. It has always been the public’s idea of a lonely place. Not many generations ago it was regarded with a certain amount of awe. Nowadays it is one of our most important centres of recreation and an island up upland England of abundant interest to the naturalist. In 1951 it was nominated a National Park, one of the first of several places that have been so designated in Great Britain.

This moorland-covered island of granite, once regarded as forbidding, now, to the most of us, romantic, rises inn the midst of a rolling sea of red Devon farmland. Here groups of devoted naturalists are attempting to west from nature some of her closely-guarded secrets. Geologists seek the true origin of the valuable pockets of china clay, or even of granite itself. Botanists delve into the relationship between the present vegetation and the relict fragments of native woodland which grow higher than any other woods in Britain. In contrast with the world of stranger isolation in the heart of Dartmoor, where the ponies roam and the black-faced sheep graze, is a fringe of lively villages like Widdicombe, whose very name spells romance.

L.A. Harvey, skilled and widely experienced naturalist, Professor in the University College of the South-west at Exeter, has collaborated with the learned D. St Leger-Gordon to make Dartmoor a balanced and consistent book, full of new syntheses and original ideas. The ideal natural history book is that which shows not only wild nature, but man’s place in it. By this token, and many others, Dartmoor is such a book.

Few of the higher animals have successfully invaded the polar regions and the sea; but those that have – the whales, seals and sea-birds – have made a wonderful success of it. There are only about 250 true sea-birds in the world (there are over thirty times as many others); yet among this select 250 are some of the most numerous and well-adapted of living species, ranging from the magnificent albatrosses, with their powers of sail-planing, to the curious diving petrels; from the penguins to the auks; from the cormorants to the gulls and terns.

The arctic tern makes the longest migratory journey of any known bird, travelling 20,000 miles between the two polar regions in the course of a year. Some sea-birds species probably spend the first seven or eight years of their lives without ever touching land; and one, the emperor penguin, never touches land in its life, for it incubates its egg on the Antarctic ice!

This book introduces the reader to the sea-birds of the North Atlantic, an ocean in which about half the world sea-bird species have been seen at one time or another. Sea-birds are generally more cosmopolitan and widespread than most land birds; and it is no surprise to the ornithologist to find that the communities on the American and European sides of the Atlantic are very similar, most of their member-species being common to both.

The authors of this book have spent most of their active lives in research on sea-birds, Lockley specialising in Life-histories, Fisher in distribution and numbers. Each has a long record of exploration of the remotest parts of the Atlantic coast and islands. Their felicitous collaboration brings home for the first time to the general bird-watcher and sea-going naturalist what enormous strides have been recently made in our knowledge of sea-birds. We now know the world population of several soecies, and can follow with accuracy the changes in the numbers of many.

The complex and wonderful organisation of the honeybee has fascinated many naturalists and writers, but the New Naturalist is fortunate in securing for its library what is undoubtedly one of the finest and most comprehensive treatises on the subject. For many years head of the research station at Rothamsted, Dr Butler's own discoveries (particularly the existence of "queen substance") are truly remarkable.

Skilfully woven into the book are the results of the work of others – such as that of von Frisch on the orientation of bees, and the almost incredible way in which information is conveyed about the distance and direction of food sources, by beautiful, extraordinary dances. The copious illustrations are all taken by the author and are marvels of close-up photography.

This edition contains the finding of latest research, including the discovery of the sex attractant released by the queen and its function; and exactly how the piping sounds made by the emerging queen are produced.

Reviews:

"Excellent guide to the mysteries of bee life, for the general reader as well as the beekeeper and entomologist"
Yorkshire Post

"Important as an exposition of a most suggestive theory, that of the "queen substance". The experiments behind this are fascinating."
Manchester Guardian

"One of the best books of this (20th) century on bees"
British Bee Journal

Professor Alistair Hardy is truly obsessed by animals of the sea – devotedly enthusiastic about the nature of their adaptations and life histories, brilliantly critical in the examination of their mysteries, acutely lucid (and at the same time highly artistic) in his descriptions of them in his arresting plates.

To describe the relatively unknown and mysterious world of plankton is a task that the greatest of marine zoologists might boggle at. Yet the plankton is to the sea what vegetation is to the land. The study of plankton is a complex discipline which few amateur naturalists have had the privilege to enjoy. Never before has such a synthesis of knowledge been attempted in a community of animals so mysterious, yet so important. Professor Hardy has grasped this problem in a new and exciting way; and at least the common reader can discern the pattern of life that dominates two-thirds of the world’s surface.