214: FACT AGAINST FICTION. 



I hold no man to be a good sportsman who 

 has not studied natm^al history, and made himself 

 acquainted with the habits of creatures and the 

 effects of weather upon their mode of life and 

 upon their haunts ; also with their instincts, 

 reason, and affection. My knowledge of the 

 nature of wild beasts, and of the class to which 

 any wild beast described hy travellers must helong^ 

 enables me at once to detect any exaggeration 

 in the narrator. To tell me that a great clumsy 

 ape '^ roars ^^ in the dense forests until he scares 

 away the lions, or that with one blow of his 

 claw, and a very moderate claw, too, he '^ knocks 

 out the intestines of a man and kills him," and 

 '^breaks in two, besides, the metal barrel of his 

 rifle," is at once to refer me to a class or genus of the 

 /era natiira, with the nature of whose cries I 

 am as perfectly acquainted, and also with their 

 means of aggression or resistance when brought 

 to bay, as if the angry creature were before me 

 in the place of its resort. 



Tlie attributes of a ^^ genus," say of the ape 

 family, from the little spider monkey to the great 

 oramr-outanff and the o^orilla, are familiar, or 

 ought to be St), to any man calHng himself a 



