BOOKS ON BIG GAME 



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in style, for some of Mr. Drummond's sentences, in point 

 of length and involution, would compare not unfavorably 

 with those of a Populist Senator discussing bimetallism. 

 Drummond is not as trustworthy an observer as Selous. 



The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teem- 

 ing wealth of strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, 

 and in places must still be, about what one's experience 

 would be if one could suddenly go back a few hundred 

 thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or Pleis- 

 tocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler's book, " Through Jungle 

 and Desert," the record of his trip through the melan- 

 choly reed beds of the Guaso Nyiro, and of his re- 

 turn journey, carrying his wounded companion, through 

 regions where the caravan was perpetually charged by 

 rhinoceros, reads like a bit out of the unreckoned ages of 

 the past, before the huge and fierce monsters of old had 

 vanished from the earth, or acknowledged man as their 

 master. An excellent book of mixed hunting and scien- 

 tific exploration is Mr. Donaldson Smith's " Through 

 Unknown African Countries." If anything, the hunting 

 part is unduly sacrificed to some of the minor scientific 

 work. Full knowledge of a new breed of rhinoceros, or 

 a full description of the life history and chase of almost 

 any kind of big game, is worth more than any quantity 

 of matter about new spiders and scorpions. Small birds 

 and insects remain in the land, and can always be de- 

 scribed by the shoal of scientific investigators who follow 

 the first adventurous explorers; but it is only the pioneer 

 hunter who can tell us all about the far more interesting 

 and important beasts of the chase, the different kinds of 



