696 
MR. G. H. GURNEY ON NATURAL HISTORY 
VI. 
NATURAL HISTORY EXPERIENCES IN 
BRITISH EAST AFRICA. 
By Gerard H. Gurney, F.Z.S. 
Read, 24 th November , 1908. 
On December 26th, last year, that is 1907, I started on a 
shooting and Natural History Expedition to British East 
Africa, and I hope this evening to be able to give you some 
account of all I did and saw there. Many of my notes are 
taken from the journal which I made a point of writing each 
evening in camp, and it has been a little difficult to string 
them together consecutively for this paper ; what I shall 
read to-night will be a general account of the Natural History, 
the scenery, and the various tribes I came in contact with, 
and I hope that at some future date I may be able to read 
a special paper on the Collection of Birds I made, which really 
formed the most important work I did there : though in 
a country like that, where all orders of Natural History are 
developed so highly and where one is daily seeing and finding 
creatures of whose existence one has merely read of before, 
or whose existence was previously unknown to science, it is a 
little difficult to specialise and one wanted to collect everything. 
my chief difficulty was to know what to collect, what to 
leave behind and what to keep ; one was so tempted to shoot 
the large gorgeously-coloured Weaver-bird in preference to 
the little dingy coloured Warbler hopping in the grass, or to 
catch some great scarlet and black Swallow-tail Butterfly, 
three times the size of our Papilio machaon, instead of taking 
the little brown Lycaenid flying near, the one being probably 
common and well-known, the other rare and obscure, and 
