336 AN AMERICAN HUNTER 



ever to let himself become a mere globe-trotting rifleman. 

 His volumes teach us just what a big game hunter, a true 

 sportsman, should be. But the best recent book on the 

 wilderness is Herr C. G. Schilling's " Mit Blitzlicht und 

 Buchse," giving the writer's hunting adventures, and 

 above all his acute scientific observations and his extra- 

 ordinary photographic work among the teeming wild 

 creatures of German East Africa. Mr. Schilling is a 

 great field naturalist, a trained scientific observer, as well 

 as a mighty hunter; and no mere hunter can ever do work 

 even remotely approaching in value that which he has 

 done. His book should be translated into English at once. 

 Every effort should be made to turn the modern big 

 game hunter into the Schilling type of adventure-loving 

 field naturalist and observer. 



I am not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, 

 or to fail to appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well 

 as to an individual, of such pastimes; but they must be 

 pastimes, and not business, and they must not be carried 

 to excess. There is much to be said for the life of a 

 professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able 

 to be something more, should be that something more 

 an explorer, a naturalist, or else a man who makes 

 his hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life 

 work. As for excessive game butchery, it amounts to a 

 repulsive debauch. The man whose chief title to glory 

 is that, during an industrious career of destruction, he 

 has slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges, 

 stands unpleasantly near those continental kings and 

 nobles who, during the centuries before the French Rev- 



