VOL. X.] FREDERICK COURTENEY SELOUS. 201 



})urely traditional character. It was the onl}' such " breach " 

 perpetrated during my five years at Rugby ! 



Soon after his school-days — I think both Dr. Temple and 

 Selous (with the present writer) left Rugby together, at 

 Christmas 1869— Selous plunged into Africa and our ways for 

 awhile lay apart. But the chronicles of his v/ild adventures 

 of that period, his ceaseless struggles during twenty years 

 with savage men and more savage beasts, are they not all 

 written in his own unequalled volumes ? Let those who 

 possess them cherish them as pure gold. No such books 

 existed before nor, with a transformed Africa, can such ever 

 be written again. I am not forgetting that other explorers 

 had preceded Selous — splendid men. too, t.ypica] of the best 

 of our race. These stalwart pioneers — such as bluff and 

 breezy Baldwin, Gordon Gumming, Gornwallis Harris and the 

 rest — also wrote, and their narratives, gloriously rough and 

 inspiring (I know them by heart !) have a true historic value, 

 since much that they told can never be told again. But in 

 them " natural history " only blurts out as it were by accident 

 — unconsciously. The advent of Selous on the African stage 

 changed all that Merely as a hunter, none of his predecessors 

 surpassed him* : but far more than that, Selous was a born 

 field-naturaUst and a trained observer whose keen eye missed 

 little, nor — to a marvel — did his pen fail to record. How and 

 when in those strenuous decades of f orest-hfe in the far interior 

 he found time to keep in touch with contemporary knowledge, 

 to preserve with his own hands a multitude of mighty speci- 

 mens, and to record day by day each and every observation, 

 great or small, in notes written under such conditions, taxes 

 our imagination — but he did it. That fact evidences an 

 aptitude for hard work — superadded to the hardest of lives — 

 and a resolution that never faltered or wasted a single hour. 



Among his published works, fain would I mention one— a 

 book that breathes the spirit of the naturalist on every page, 

 an analysis of carefully tested observation, and of that cautious 

 deduction that never overpasses its proved bases by an inch. 

 I refer to his African Nature Notes and Reminiscences, written 

 in 1908 on the suggestion of President Roosevelt. 



In Africa Selous paid comparatively little special attention 

 to birds, though butterflies attracted him to the very last. 



* In one of the weekly journals appeared a paragraph implying 

 that Selous was only a moderate shot. Surely it is common knowledge 

 that he was one of the safest and most brilliant rifle-shots the world 

 has ever produced ; besides being a dashing rough-rider after every 

 class of game, from elephants, giraffe, sable and oryx, down to cheetahs 

 and wild dogs. 



