THE AMATEUR NATURALIST'S HANDBOOK

A nice fat omnibus book, full of interesting material on plants, animals, weather, minerals, etc. There's an unusual twist in the manner of organization. The material is divided into three sections, each covering the same broad topics, but arranged in order of progressive difficulty. The rank beginner will find the first section comprehensible, and so automatically progress to the second, and then to the third sections. We could do without the purple passages, but in the main the book is sound scientifically, and provocative and stimulating. The one section that seems a bit above the reach of the amateur naturalist is that dealing with biology, which would seems to demand some basic knowledge of the subject.