NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 397 
Lord Malmesbury’s Reminiscences of Sport and Natural History. 
In ‘Memoirs of an Ex-Minister.’ 2 vols. 8vo. London: 
Longmans & Co. 1885. 
In the two entertaining volumes which Lord Malmesbury has 
published, entitled ‘Memoirs of an Ex-Minister,’ in which the 
author’s experiences of men and manners are set down in diary- 
form, we find occasional entries relating to sport with gun and 
rod, and to the habits of wild animals, which possess an interest 
for sportsmen and naturalists, but which are likely to be over- 
looked by readers who might perhaps suppose that an Ex- 
Minister could have nothing to write about but subjects of 
political or social import. Lord Malmesbury, though a busy 
man, who from the exigencies of his position was obliged to be 
much in London during the earlier and middle part of his 
political career, had yet a keen appreciation of country life, and 
enjoyed a good day’s shooting or fishing as much as any man. 
His methodical habits induced him to note these “good days” in 
his diary, and it is to be regretted that the few scattered entries 
which are to be found in his book do not supply fuller details 
which from a sportsman of his experience would have been both 
interesting and valuable. His experience of stag-hunting in 
France, to which country he was a frequent visitor, often as the 
guest of the Emperor Napoleon IIL., is thus alluded to :— 
“1837, June 15th.— The Duke of Orleans is extremely kind and civil 
to me, and asked me to hunt at Chantilly. The Stag broke away from the 
forest, and took us nearly to Beauvais. His Royal Highness presented me 
with the foot, which the artist Susse has tnrned into a pen-rack. The Duke 
also gave me the buttons of his hunt. The costume is dark blue, with a 
red collar; his crown and initials on silver buttons ” (vol. i., p. 81). 
It is perhaps not generally known that deer when brought to 
bay have a habit of defending themselves by striking vigorously 
with their fore-feet as well as with their horns. Gilbert White, 
in one of his letters to Pennant (Letter VII.), thus relates how a 
dog was killed in this way by a hind in the forest of Wolmer :— 
“Some fellows suspecting that a new-fallen ‘calf’ was deposited 
in a certain spot of thick fern, went with a lurcher to surprise it, 
when the parent hind rushed out of the brake and, taking a vast 
spring with all her feet close together, pitched upon the neck of 
the dog and broke it short in two.” 
