Welsh Journals

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example, in the copy reviewed, the flowers of Potentilla Crantzii seem too orange, and greens are unsatisfactory they are too yellow in Lycopodium annotinum and too blue in Salix herbacea and Saxifraga cernua. Of course, it seems useless to expect accurate reproduction of purple tints, such as the brilliant magenta of the flowers of Geranium sanguineum. (Remember the plate in Wild Flowers of Chalk and Limestone ?) However, the black-and-white plates are much better. Those of Koenigia islandica and Artemisia norvegica are poor, perhaps because better photographs were not available, but the remainder are very fine. Indeed, some are beautiful examples of photography- Carex capillaris, Hieracium holosericeum, Polystichum Lonchitis and Rubus Chamaemorus might be mentioned. Errors are remarkably few "Rumex acetosa sheep's sorrel," on p. 168 is one. This book certainly should please both the novice and the expert. It is a worthy addition to the New Naturalist series. P.M.B. ROCKALL. JAMES FISHER. London, Geoffrey Bles. 1956. 18s. Wild AMERICA. ROGER PETERSON and JAMES FISHER. London, Collins, 1956. 30s. In 1948 two of the Honorary Wardens of the West Wales Field Society sailed for the remote and then unclaimed islet of Rockall. They went in a trawler after an arrangement for a ketch (which was to have had James Fisher also as crew) had broken down at Penzance. Stephen Marchant and R.M.L. sailed from Fleetwood and the result of this unofficial W.W.F.S. expedition is reported in British Birds vol. 44. In his book James Fisher describes this expedition by extracts from published material (he is, by the way, a longstanding member of the W.W.F.S.). He was lucky enough to be included as the marine ornithologist on the occasion when Rockall was annexed, by order of Her Majesty, on 18th September, 1955, and in this book he graphically describes that great occasion, the first landing ever made on Rockall by helicopter. It was not in the breeding season and so the mystery of what species of sea-birds nest on Rockall remains. But almost certainly guille- mots do nest, even if their eggs are washed away by violent summer gales. This book is a fascinating report of all the attempts to land, and the landings, real and spurious, ever made. The dense popula- tion of fulmars and great, sooty and Manx shearwaters on the lonely wastes of the Rockall Bank, are a great attraction to ornithologists, and the reviewer well remembers the great pleasure he had from studying these as compensation for the mal de mer experienced in the trawler. One wonders where the Manx shearwaters come from, probably from northward, even Icelandic colonies, hardly from Welsh colonies, which seem to feed in a more southerly arc. One