This is the cover of the book.  The book is really only interesting if you can see the pictures, so you should turn on image loading if your browser is capable of it.  If you don't have a graphical browser, you can load the file fulltext.txt in this directory (see below) to read the poems, but they don't stand by themselves very well.

This is a book which belonged to my great-grandmother that I have enjoyed since childhood. I noticed the copyright had expired in the US, so I scanned it in so everyone can read it. The two-color gifs are small (under 10k) and should load very quickly even on a slow connection. I have transcribed the text as well, but it doesn't stand very well on its own; the special thing about the book is Woods' terrific rendering of the birds and plants.

Feel free to download the gifs to your own computer should you so desire. (To do this in Netscape on a Mac, move the mouse pointer over the image and hold the button down for a second or two - you will get a menu with the option to save the image to your disk. On a Windows machine, you can accomplish the same task by clicking with the right mouse button.)

Click here for a text-only transcription for those without graphical browsers

The scans presented here are from the 1907 edition, and were done when I (and most people) only had a dialup connection to the Internet, which is why they were made so small. These images can also be found in the Project Gutenberg collection, to which I donated them not long after I posted them here. (Circa 1995). It is worth noting that GoogleBooks now has a copy of this book available for download as a pdf file, at a higher resolution.

Would you like to buy a modern reprint of How to tell the Birds from the Flowers? It is available on Lulu!

I have recently acquired a copy of the 1917 edition, which has a number of additional woodcuts. I may scan that for presentation as well, if I have enough encouragement. However, most of my scanning energies are now directed towards Art Song Central.

Onward to the Contents Page!

Sites with links to the book include:


This page is maintained (but rarely) by David Newman.