SEA SHORE AND SEASONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 517, 20 May 1949, Page 15

SEA SHORE AND SEASONS

LIFE ON THE SEA SHORE. Written and Illustrated by Dr. E, A. R, Ennion. Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press. 3/-. NEWS FROM NATURE. By Alec H. Chisholm. Illustrated. ene House, Melbourne. 10/6. HE little book on Life on the Sea Shore, by Dr. Ennion, is No. 25 in a list of 29 Chameleon books for children. That, however, should not scare off adult readers; indeed anyone with an interest, either amateur or expert, in the creatures and plants of earth and water will surely read these 76 pages with a great deal of pleasure. How simply Dr. Ennion explains his polyps, his bristle worms, his shellfish family and his beau-

tifully coloured shore plants-but he does not oversimplify and thus mislead. His drawings, black and white and in colour, could grace the most magically illustrated of the newest expensive books for children: and again

accuracy and simplicity are the first characteristics, Mr. Chisholm’s book, three times the price, three times the size, has for me only about one third of the charm of Dr. Ennion’s. News from Nature is a reprint of 48 newspaper sketches on wild. fife published in Melbourne during the war. There are a dozen articles for each of the seasons; and round each article there is a good deal of the tedious wrapping that newspaper columnists sometimes use over-lavishly. But after the third paragraph, once or twice after the second paragraph, the subject appearsthe strange orchids, the migratory birds, the fungi, the birds’ nests, the wild flowers-and Mr. Chisholm is square on the note, simple, straightforward, and interesting. Most of the photographs are his own and some of them, particularly the ones of birds’ nests, are quite beautiful. There are typographical errors in this book which is on the whole disappoint-

ing for a post-war production.

J.