10 May 2014 | NewScientist | 47

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for nearly 80 years has authored highly rigorous textbooks, all under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki. Bellos can’t give the member’s name, saying only that he has a beard and wears a purple shirt and a straw hat.

Bellos has a fantastic knack of making you feel as if you’re sharing a room with these mathematical explorers, but I can’t help feel his choice of locations is less inspired than in his previous book, Alex’s Adventures in Numberland, which journeyed through India and Japan, as well as the European and US locales of his new book.

If you haven’t read Numberland, I urge you to pick it up, and come back to Looking-Glass afterwards if you have a desire to fall even further down the mathematical rabbit hole. n

The Book of Eggs: A life-size guide to the eggs of six hundred of the world’s bird species by Mark E. Hauber, University of Chicago Press, $55

Adrian Barnett

BOILED, coddled, fried, scrambled or poached, our usual interaction with eggs is as a consumer: the inside is to be eaten. Once

broken, the shell is lobbed in the bin and forgotten.

Except that this is probably not what you are going to do after reading The Book of Eggs. Newly enlightened on egg biology and physiology, you may find yourself pointing out that the dimple in the broad end of an egg is where the air sac lay. Or perhaps you will be motivated to look at an egg shell through a lens, the better to see the tiny pores that allow air in while keeping water and toxins

out – or even pause before eating your fried egg to dissect the yolk in search of its seven layers.

Beyond the brown and white eggs we are used to, there is a dazzling array of colours and patterns. While the occasional speckled egg might elicit a comment at the breakfast table, it pales into insignificance against the rich copper of the eggs of Cetti’s warbler. And the green-blue eggs of the great tinamou are so beautiful that an encounter with the nest of this Amazonian species was the only time I have known one of my long-term field guides to rhapsodise about egg colour rather than edibility.

In terms of pattern, it is hard to beat the eggshell of the guira cuckoo (which looks like a chocolate dessert drizzled with evaporated milk), the scribbled surface of a great bowerbird egg, or the translucent, multi-layered patterning of the eggs of cedar and bohemian waxwings, where the blotching seems to loom through a fog of shell.

Each of the book’s 600 eggs is

Inside story of eggsEven the most humble supermarket variety will acquire a bit of mystique after this foray

Eggfest: the amazing scope of biology’s great packaging exercise

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photographed life size, with magnified views of the smaller ones to allow us to appreciate the detail. For each, a summary of breeding biology links form to function. Oddly, the amazing exercise in biological packaging that is the egg sometimes makes species vulnerable to predators. The Antarctic giant petrel, for example, evolved on rodent-free islands and its white eggs are easy prey for invasive rodents.

The book also wisely includes the egg of the extinct great auk, the last few of which were hunted down to make sure that museums had skins and eggs of this once-abundant seabird.

Altogether, this book achieves a fine synergy between informative text and beautiful photographs. My only trifling criticism is that placing the eggs on a black rather than a white background would have made their lustre and beauty stand out still more. n

Adrian Barnett is a rainforest ecologist at Brazil’s national Institute of amazonian research in Manaus

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