April 6, 190G.] 



SCIENCE. 



541 



the naturalist and all who find the truth about 

 animals often stranger and always infinitely 

 better than fiction. One should not look here 

 for biographies or detailed studies of any of 

 the animals, nor for a critical analysis of 

 their behavior, nor, indeed, for a hint of many 

 of those problems which appeal most to a 

 philosophic naturalist of the type of Dar- 

 win, or Wallace, and the author's zoolog- 

 ical training is evidently not that of the 

 schools. His frequent reference to ' my 

 genus ' and ' my species ' takes us back to a 

 period when the aims of natural history were 

 too apt to reach a climax in the discovery of 

 new forms. But we should not expect every- 

 thing of a hunter of big and dangerous game, 

 who is a good field naturalist in the bargain. 



Taking it all together this author's accom- 

 plishment is remarkable, whether considered 

 as a record of travel and adventure, as a 

 portrait gallery or rather as a panorama of 

 the great world of animal life under the 

 equator, or as the journal of a field-naturalist 

 whose sole object, as he tells us, was to study 

 the lives of the animals. 



It should be added that this narrative is 

 not the only outcome of Herr Schillings's 

 labors, for aside from the discovery of many 

 plants and animals, ranging from giraffes and 

 antelopes to insect-parasites, and including 

 several species of birds, he was the first in 

 recent times to take alive to Europe the East 

 African rhinoceros, the white-bearded gnu, 

 and other interesting denizens of the velt; he 

 himself collected, and, at his private expense, 

 with the help of a large caravan, prepared and 

 forwarded to Berlin, and to the museums of 

 other German cities, thousands of the skins, 

 skulls and skeletons of the vanishing fauna 

 of the great East African velt, besides col- 

 lecting embryos and other anatomical or bio- 

 logical material. 



This signal work has been achieved literally 

 through the sweat of his brow, with the help 

 of a physical constitution happily more than 

 a match for the fevers which often laid him 

 low, with the aid of a private fortune which 

 seems to have been ample — in the famine year 

 of 1899 his provisions alone (for he never had 

 less than 130 men) cost him over five thousand 



dollars — with a keen enthusiasm for nature, 

 and as he would add, with the aid of a lucky 

 star which never left him for long at a time. 



Schillings's book now authoritatively trans- 

 lated and published in this country makes a 

 large and handsomely illustrated volimie. It 

 is admirably printed upon thin, highly pol- 

 ished paper, which serves well the purposes 

 of engraving, even if it does not keep the size 

 of the volume within bounds. The publishers 

 seem to realize what many have not learned, 

 that good half-tone engravings do not require 

 the heavy weight of paper so often employed, 

 and that the prints once made are easily 

 marred by careless handling when fresh from 

 the press. The illustrations are exceptionally 

 free from ' pencil marks ' produced in this 

 way. 



Preceding this edition by a few weeks there 

 appeared an abridged translation of the same 

 work, but under another title,^ which the pub- 

 lishers of the complete and better edition 

 denounce as 'pirated.' The illustrations of 

 the lesser volume, which apparently were 

 made direct from the engravings of the Ger- 

 man work, rather than from the original pho- 

 tographs or blocks, are necessarily inferior, 

 and do but scant justice to the beauty of 

 much of Schillings's photographic work. One 

 of these half-tone engravings, entitled ' Ibis 

 Nests' (see p. 46), is even placed bottom-side 

 up, but really it matters not how it is regarded 

 on the page, for it is only a blur of printer's 

 ink, and illustrates nothing. 



There is an introduction by Sir H. H. 

 Johnston, the discoverer of the okapi, and 

 author of a recent elaborate work on the 

 native races of man in East Africa, entitled 

 ' The Urganda Protectorate.' The transla- 

 tion seems to be well done, and the text is 

 extremely interesting from end to end. Ap- 

 pendices give full lists of the vertebrate ani- 

 mals discovered and collected, but the reader 

 will look in vain for either an index St a map. 



Both author and editor make an eloquent 



^ ' With Flashlight and Eifle,' Photographing 

 by Flash-Light at Night the Wild Animal World 

 of Equatorial Africa, translated and abridged by 

 Henry Zick, Ph.D., pp. xiv + 422, with 123 illus- 

 trations; Harper and Brothers, New York, 1905. 



