198 AFRICAN NATURE NOTES chap. 



The only other man whose experience with 

 rhinoceroses in East Africa has been equal to that 

 of Arthur Neumann is Mr. F. J. Jackson, C.B., 

 who for some years past has been a most able 

 administrator of the territories in which he first 

 made a name as a hunter and a naturalist. Mr. 

 Jackson's testimony concerning the character of the 

 black rhinoceros as he has known that animal 

 appears to me to coincide very closely with that 

 arrived at by Neumann, his great friend and only 

 rival as a hunter in East Africa. Like Neumann, 

 Jackson fully realises that black rhinoceroses are 

 sometimes vicious and dangerous, but his experience 

 has been that, as a rule, these animals avoid and run 

 away from human beings if they can, and that even 

 when they rush snorting through a long line of 

 native porters, they are usually trying to escape 

 from rather than viciously attacking these men. In 

 the course of the very interestinor article on the 

 black rhinoceros contributed by Mr. F. J. Jackson 

 to vol. i. on Big Game Shooting of the Badminton 

 Library, he states: "When alarmed, the rhinoceros 

 becomes easily flurried, appears to do things on 

 impulse which other animals endowed with more 

 sagacity would not do, and is by no means the 

 vicious and vindictive brute which some writers 

 have found him to be in South Africa and the 

 Soudan. In the majority of cases, where a rhino- 

 ceros is said, by men who perhaps have not been 

 very well acquainted with his peculiarities, to have 

 charged in a most determined and vicious manner, 

 I believe this so-called charge to have been nothing 

 more than the first headlong and impetuous rush 

 of the beast in a semidazed state, endeavouring to 

 avoid an encounter rather than court one." 



In the course of the Report made to the Earl of 

 Elgin on the game of the East Africa Proctectorate 

 by the Chief Commissioner, Captain (now Sir 



