THE BORI FOREST 317 



familiar with the sone kutte. They are drawn much too 

 smooth-coated and not red enough, but otherwise about 

 right. By-the-by, the artist who drew the wild buffaloes 

 could never have seen one, as he makes the horns to curl 

 back like those of an ibex. When a child, I remember 

 well taking immense delight in that old book, which was 

 kept on a shelf and only shown as a great treat to extra- 

 good boys. 



The hunting instinct is easily developed in the youthful 

 mind by such books ; and that a period comprising ten 

 years of my hfe was spent in the forests of India, in imme- 

 diate contact with nature in its most interesting and 

 wildest phases, had something to say to the pictures in 

 Williamson. The books of Catlin, and, later, Gordon 

 Gumming,* assisted in stimulating the taste for hunting, 

 which, combined with a love of plants and trees, conspired 

 to make practical work in the forests most fascinating. 

 That such was my lot I can never regret. That it was 

 cast under the guidance of old Indian officers in times 

 when the services could still boast of such names as 

 Lawrence, Golvin, Drummond, Dalhousie, and, not least, 

 Ramsay, I look on as a great honour. That the love of 

 the chase is compatible with perseverance in sterner 

 work I have proved. That nothing but benefit to mind 

 and body accrues from enthusiastic participation in the 

 chase, even the more artificial one of the fox, I am firmly 

 convinced. Young men who have to fight the battles 

 of their coimtry can have no better training than the 

 chase, to knit the muscles and develop them to the best 



* I have not visited that former paradise of hunters, South Africa, 

 but I have hunted the bison of America when millions wandered over 

 its vast prairies, and I have shot the great wapiti stag in the Rockies, 

 and the big-horn ram, which comes very near the Ovis Amnion, so 

 that the interest awakened by those old books did not completely 

 languish. 



