96 TAXIDERMY AND MODELLING 



Shooting} which no intending sportsman or collector abroad 

 should be without, and in which are summarised all the 

 technicalities of the art, past and present. 



Perhaps it may be as well to point out that there is no 

 one gun which will do everything, in spite of the ingenious 

 combinations sold to intending sportsmen and emigrants, 

 which, if the " Paradox " be excepted, are usually like other 

 " combination " implements — more easily sold than used. A 

 " battery," suited to the animals to be shot and to the man 

 who is to use it, is a sine qud non, as no one dreams of using, 

 say, a double 4-bore elephant-gun upon deer. Even in Eng- 

 land, where the wild animals to be shot with a rifle are limited 

 to three — the red deer, the rabbit, and the rook, — two rifles of 

 different calibre are necessary, unless, indeed, the ingenious 

 " Morris tube " be used as a converter of a large-bored rifle to 

 a lesser. 



The " bagging " of foreign mammals, having a vast litera- 

 ture of its own, need not be further discussed, and the mammals 

 of Britain, if the whales and other cetaceans (sometimes shot 1) 

 be excepted, are so few that their methods of capture are well 

 known. 



There are special methods of trapping known to many 

 gamekeepers ; and some treatises there are which may be 

 studied with advantage by the amateur trapper ; ^ usually, how- 

 ever, the traps are the ordinary steel ones, " figure of 4's," 

 other dead-falls, various box-traps, and sometimes poison — 

 which seems a villainous way of destroying animals, and should 

 be made penal. 



It is pleasing to find that the Hon. Gerald Lascelles con- 

 siders the dead-fall and the box-trap humane, and decries the 



^ The Badminton Library, Big-Game Shooting, vols. i. and ii., by Cliye Phillipps- 

 "WoUey. 



2 The Game-preserver's Manual, by Captain Darwin ("High Elms ") ; Practical 

 Trapping, by W. Carnegie ; Shooting {Field and Covert), Badminton Library. 



