A DAY'S ELEPHANT HUNTING 



IN ESSEX. 



BY HENEY WALIvER, F. G. S. 



(A Lecture delivered May 2dth, 1880J 



SOME OLD GAME PRESEEVES. 



Each old elephant grins with vast amaze, 

 While rousing him from his marble hearse, 



As a world so new and so strange he surveys ; 



And doubtless he thinks that since his younger days 

 Things are strikmgly changed for the worse. 



William Conybeare. 



In the rural sports and recreations to which so many 

 happy Londoners now devote their Saturday afternoons, 

 what outcroppings of the lurking instincts and pursuits of 

 savage man might not the eyes of anthropologists detect ! 

 Below the sober-looking, scientific guise of the modern 

 London naturalist, who starts at two o'clock on Saturdays 

 from " the smoke and stir of this dim spot," for shining 

 river, lake, or glooming woodland (armed with divers 

 wondrous implements and bags of artful make), how much 

 might, perhaps, be traced of innate and ancestral love 

 of hunting — of reversion to the untamed instincts and 

 delights of savage hfe ! As iambs and kids (so Mr. Darwin 

 tells us) betray their Alpine origin by their fondness for the 

 smallest hillock on which to leap and frisk, so it seems do 

 City denizens, released on Saturdays from artificial life, 

 betray the birthplace of their race by their forms of 



