A GREAT NATURALIST'S RECORD

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21010, 11 November 1933, Page 15

A GREAT NATURALIST'S RECORD

THE KING COUNTRY IN THE 'EIGHTIES Yesterdays in Maoriland. By Andreas Reischek. Life and Letters Series: Jonathan Cape. 312 pp. (4s 6d net.)

Reischek was one of the great German and Austrian naturalists who did more than Englishmen to observe and report upon the vanishing flora and fauna of New Zealand. In the early 'eighties came his greatest privilege and experience, when he was admitted to the sacred King Country. There he not only " won an insight into a disappearing race culture, but was also able to study the indigenous animal world still living undisturbed in an extensive world of bush." Few naturalists have had this good fortune before or since. He was preeminently fitted for natural observation by knowledge, enthusiasm, and penetration ; but his greatest qualification was his physical determination. He withstood months of extreme loneliness and dragged himself about in perilous places when he was enfeebled by illness and severe injuries. His patience and persistence were superhuman. His life was often in danger and lie suffered grave losses from the clumsiness of those to whose care he entrusted his hard-won trophies. One day he tried for 10 long hours to light a fire, and succeeded on the following day only by thawing sticks against his body. He was obliged to slay many birds and beasts which he wanted for museum pieces in New Zealand and Austria: but his love for living creatures never faded. There came to him often the understanding of the "spiritual kinship of all living things, the coherence of the maniiold works of God," and, in tiiis spirit, he saw that the fall of the Kauri was " this last free Maori - land falling under the machine of Europe " The expression of the book is simple and sincere like the writer, and it reflects his cheerful singleness of purpose. It is never dull. Whether it was the caged King Country tui. which greeted him with " Gutcn Moi'gen, Herr !" his charming dog, or the puffins that walked into his frying-pan, he seemed always to encounter in man and bird and beast some pleasant, unusual phase that less sympathetic men never experience. The translator and editor, Mr H. E. L. Priday, spent a few years in New Zealand, but did not learn how to spell the simplest Maori names. Such mis-spellings are incalculable and annoying. Tc Ma becomes tc Na (a misprint), but Kaiopoi, Pokekoho, and Paroa are such obvious blunders that one is not surprised to see the Hon. Mr McLeod appearing more than once, as Mr Leod. Reischek himself is scrupulously accurate, except in the chapter called "A Slice of History," which was written too close to the events it describes to be perfectly impartial. Reischek's original work set him beside Dieffenbach and Hochstctter. His journeys were more arduous than those of Henry Williams and Iladfield, and his personality, so simple and kind, makes him one of the most delightful characters who made some contribution to what, even in the narrowest judgment, must be called New Zealand literature. In the cheap, but handsome, form of thi,s reprint series, the book should be widely read and re-read.

THE JiEES' YEAR The Way ol' a Bee. By Goers' ltendl L<n;;imm;> Green and Co. Ltd (o's net.)

I Georg Rendl lias spent his life ■among hives and his book, the outcome of years of "grateful watching and curious observation," is meant to be a simple record of bee life as the author knows it. Remarkable for its straightforwardness, this engrossing account of a community of bees passes from one winter to the next: from " days and nights of crisp, sonorous cold," when death takes daily toll ; through the spring when the sun rouses the bees to cleanse the hive and prepare the cradles for the coming race ; into the joyful summer, when the " sheer ■ coiour 01 tnc coltsfoot cries like an alarm through the land" and the honey-gatherers go through the unvarying ritual of the pollen-dance ana the hive fills with young bees ; and on into autumn, when the sun, having given fulfilment to all things, is waning in strength and the toil and tumult of the hive grows Jess, until the winter, when queen-mother and workers make ready to face the time of trist. There is no sentimental or fantastic attempt at interpretation of the bee's life, but a concise statement of facts : " No bee breaks the law. Each yields to all. All that is small and insignificant and individual must pass away and have no end, must merge into the whole and be lost in it." This sounds as though the book might be little better than a philosophic treatise ; but it lias a lovely lilting quality in its pi >. •* which makes it a work of art. VI e book will prove itself absorbingly interesting, even to readers who have no personal affection for bees, no desire for natural history knowledge, and no commercial interest in honey. The translation from the German is made by Patrick Kirwan, who has " adapted "the rhythm and lyricism of the original to the reticence of English prose " remarkably well.