BOOKS ON BIG GAME 325 



writers are trustworthy and interesting; though the palm 

 must be given to Oswell's delightful account of his South 

 African hunting. The book on the game beasts of Africa 

 edited by Mr. Bryden is admirable in every way. 



In all these books the one point to be insisted on is that 

 a big game hunter has nothing in common with so many 

 of the men who delight to call themselves sportsmen. Sir 

 Samuel Baker has left a very amusing record of the 

 horror he felt for the Ceylon sportsmen who, by the term 

 " sport," meant horse-racing instead of elephant shooting. 

 Half a century ago, Gordon-Gumming wrote of " the life 

 of the wild hunter, so far preferable to that of the mere 

 sportsman " ; and his justification for this somewhat sneer- 

 ing reference to the man who takes his sport in too artifi- 

 cial a manner, may be found in the pages of a then noted 

 authority on such sports as horse-racing and fox-hunting; 

 for in Apperly's " Nimrod Abroad," in the course of an 

 article on the game of the American wilderness, there 

 occurs this delicious sentence: "A damper, however, is 

 thrown over all systems of deer-stalking in Canada by the 

 necessity, which is said to be unavoidable, of bivouacking 

 in the woods instead of in well-aired sheets!" Verily, 

 there was a great gulf between the two men. 



In the present century the world has known three 

 great hunting-grounds: Africa, from the equator to the 

 southernmost point; India, both farther and hither; and 

 North America west of the Mississippi, from the Rio 

 Grande to the Arctic Circle. The latter never ap- 

 proached either of the former in the wealth and variety 

 of the species, or in the size and terror of the chief beasts 



