BOOKS ON BIG GAME 



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as his. In central Africa the game has lasted to our own 

 time; the hunting described by Alfred Neumann and 

 Vaughn Kirby in the closing years of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury was almost as good as any enjoyed by their brothers 

 who fifty years before steered their ox-drawn wagons 

 across the " high veldt " of the south land. 



Moreover, the pencil has done its part as well as the 

 pen. Harris, who was the pioneer of all the hunters, 

 published an admirable illustrated folio entitled " The 

 Game and Wild Animals of South Africa." It is per- 

 haps of more value than any other single work of the kind. 

 J. G. Millais, in " A Breath from the Veldt," has rendered 

 a unique service, not only by his charming descriptions, 

 but by his really extraordinary sketches of the South 

 African antelopes, both at rest, and in every imaginable 

 form of motion. Nearly at the other end of the continent 

 there is an admirable book on lion-hunting in Somali- 

 land, by Captain C. J. Melliss. Much information about 

 big game can be taken from the books of various mission- 

 aries and explorers; Livingstone and Du Chaillu doing 

 for Africa in this respect what Catlin did for North 

 America. 



As we have said before, one great merit of these books 

 is that they are interesting. Quite a number of men who 

 are good sportsmen, as well as men of means, have written 

 books about their experiences in Africa; but the trouble 

 with too many of these short and simple annals of the rich 

 is, that they are very dull. They are not literature, any 

 more than treatises on farriery and cooking are literature. 

 To read a mere itinerary is like reading a guide-book. 



