The books listed are dominantly scientific. Some include keys to identification. Once a person has learned to use the key for identifying botanical or ornithological species, he can spend the remainder of his life adding to his stature. BIRDS BAILEY, FLORENCE MERRIAM. _Birds of New Mexico_, 1928. OP. Said by those who know to be at the top of all state bird books. Much on habits. BEDICHEK, ROY. _Adventures with a Texas Naturalist_ (1947) and _Karankaway Country_ (1950), Doubleday, Garden City, N. Y. These are books of essays on various aspects of nature, but nowhere else can one find an equal amount of penetrating observation on chimney swifts, Inca doves, swallows, golden eagles, mockingbirds, herons, prairie chickens, whooping cranes, swifts, scissortails, and some other birds. As Bedichek writes of them they become integrated with all life. BRANDT, HERBERT. _Arizona and Its Bird Life_, Bird Research Foundation, Cleveland, 1951. This beautiful, richly illustrated volume of 525 pages lives up to its title; the birds belong to the Arizona country, and with them we get pines, mesquites, cottonwoods, John Slaughter's ranch, the northward-flowing San Pedro, and many other features of the land. Herbert Brandt's _Texas Bird Adventures_, illustrated by George Miksch Sutton (Cleveland, 1940), is more on the Big Bend country and ranch country to the north than on birds, though birds are here. DAWSON, WILLIAM LEON. _The Birds of California_, San Diego, etc., California, 1923. OP. Four magnificent volumes, full in illustrations, special observations on birds, and scientific data. DOBIE, J. FRANK, who is no more of an ornithologist than he is a geologist, specialized on an especially characteristic bird of the Southwest and gathered its history, habits, and folklore into a long article: "The Roadrunner in Fact and Folklore," in _In the Shadow of History_, Publication XV of the Texas Folklore Society, Austin, 1939. OP. "Bob More: Man and Bird Man," _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXVII, No. 1 (Autumn, 1941). NICE, MARGARET MORSE. _The Birds of Oklahoma_, Norman, 1931. OP. United States Biological Survey publication. OBERHOLSER, HARRY CHURCH. The Birds of Texas in manuscript form. "A stupendous work, the greatest of its genre, by the nation's outstanding ornithologist, who has been fifty years making it." The quotation is condensed from an essay by Roy Bedichek in the _Southwest Review_, Dallas, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (Winter, 1953). Maybe some day some man or woman with means will see the light of civilized patriotism and underwrite the publication of these great volumes. Patriotism that does not act to promote the beautiful, the true, and the good had better pipe down.