How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers and Other Woodcuts

Robert Williams Wood was a serious physicist with a mischievous streak, and in 1907 he put the second trait to work in this pocket manual of flornithology for beginners. Each page sets a bird beside a flower, fruit, or vegetable whose name or shape resembles it, the parrot and the carrot being the classic example, then adds a short comic verse and a deliberately crude woodcut so the reader can never again confuse the two. The joke runs on puns and mock-scientific solemnity, and it holds up because Wood commits to it completely. Light, quick, and quietly clever, it has amused readers for well over a century. This edition is free to download as a PDF and EPUB.