He lets one see very clearly into the workings of his mind in this direction in what is perhaps the finest, although the least well known of his books, The Five Windows of the Soul (John Murray), in which he discourses in his own inimitable way of the five senses, and how they bring man and beast into contact with their surroundings.  It is a book on perceiving, and shows how according as this faculty is exercised it makes each man such as he is.  The following extract from the book shows Mr. Aitken’s style, and may perhaps induce some to go to the book itself for more from the same source.  He is speaking of the moral sense.  “And it is almost a truism to say that, if a man has any taste, it will show itself in his dress and in his dwelling.  No doubt, through indolence and slovenly habits, a man may allow his surroundings to fall far below what he is capable of approving; but every one who does so pays the penalty in the gradual deterioration of his perceptions.

“How many times more true is all this in the case of the moral sense?  When the heart is still young and tender, how spontaneously and sweetly and urgently does every vision of goodness and nobleness in the conduct of another awaken the impulse to go and do likewise!  And if that impulse is not obeyed, how certainly does the first approving perception of the beauty of goodness become duller, until at last we may even come to hate it where we find it, for its discordance with the ’motions of sins in our members’!

“But not less certainly will every earnest effort to bring the life into unison with what we perceive to be right bring its own reward in a clearer and more joyful perception of what is right, and a keener sensitiveness to every discord in ourselves.  How all such discord may be removed, how the chords of the heart may be tuned and the life become music,—­these are questions of religion, which are quite beyond our scope.  But I take it that every religion which has prevailed among the children of Adam is in itself an evidence that, however debased and perverted the moral sense may have become, the painful consciousness that his heart is ‘like sweet bells jangled’ still presses everywhere and always on the spirit of man; and it is also a conscious or unconscious admission that there is no blessedness for him until his life shall march in step with the music of the ‘Eternal Righteousness.’”

Mr. Aitken’s name will be kept green among Anglo-Indians by the well-known series of books published by Messrs. Thacker & Co., of London and Calcutta.  They are The Tribes on my Frontier, An Indian Naturalist’s Foreign Policy, which was published in 1883, and of which a seventh edition appeared in 1910.  This book deals with the common birds, beasts, and insects in and around an Indian bungalow, and it should be put into the hands of every one whose lot is cast in India.  It will open their eyes to the beauty and interests of their surroundings in a truly wonderful way, and may be read again and again with increasing pleasure as one’s experience of Indian life increases.