viii PREFACE 



may be acquired if the outdoors observer will direct his in- 

 vestigations along the broad lines covering the life-history of 

 the species with which he comes in contact. To carry out 

 such investigations successfully it would be necessary to 

 spend many hours and days, perhaps even weeks and 

 months, observing certain individuals or family groups of 

 game. This is quite beyond the limits of time alloted the 

 average sportsman. Nevertheless much can be learned by 

 the collected evidence from many fragmentary observa- 

 tions, providing only these are accurate. A great mass of 

 accurate fragmentary observations will often spell far more 

 progress in investigations of this kind than the observations 

 of a few trained individuals over an extended period of time. 

 The specimens of game animals most familiar to the 

 writers are those secured by the Smithsonian African expe- 

 dition under the direction of Colonel Roosevelt, which are 

 now preserved in the National Museum at Washington. 

 This collection consists of some six hundred specimens of 

 big-game mammals from British East Africa and the upper 

 Nile regions, comprising more than seventy species or races, 

 nearly all of which are represented by series of various ages 

 and sexes. Besides this collection, Edmund Heller has 

 examined at the National Museum the Paul J. Rainey col- 

 lection from British East Africa consisting of some four 

 hundred specimens of big game, the Abbott collection from 

 Kilimanjaro, the Carl Akeley collection from British East 

 Africa in the Field Museum, the Tjader collection in the 

 American Museum of Natural History, the British Museum 

 collections, the Powell-Cotton collection from northern 

 Uganda and Mount Elgon, the Berlin Museum collection, 

 the Congo Museum collection at Brussels, the Paris Museum 



