52 
NATURE NOTES. 
is by no means among the best, but its history renders it 
peculiarly suitable for reproduction in these pages. Wolf 
severely censured the slaughter which made the reputation of 
hunters of the Gordon Gumming type. “ One day, when he 
felt particularly angry, he caught up a bit of charcoal and made 
the sketch. It was intended as a kind of counterblast or protest 
against the popular notion of sport, and the general tendency of 
Cumming’s anecdotes. These are the words in which Wolf 
imagines that writer would have described the incident : — ‘ On 
coming into the neighbourhood of our waggons, our dogs gave 
tongue in a clump of bushes. I walked on, and there was a 
savage lioness ! I knocked her over with my first barrel, and 
then I found that she had cubs, which were instantly torn to 
pieces and greedily devoured by our hungry dogs.’ ” 
The following opinion will be warmly endorsed by Sel- 
bornians, and might even be taken as a qualification of certain 
statements as to the connection between “ sport ” and love of 
nature, made at the recent Annual Meeting of the Society for 
the Protection of Birds. 
Wolf not only thinks an innate craving for sport and the insatiable desire to 
kill, a relic of a savage condition out of keeping with the exalted culture and 
civilization we claim, but he girds at the superficial character of the average 
sportsman’s knowledge of animals. He says, “They have no desire to know 
about a thing ; their only desire is to kill it.” He fairly boils over at the acts of in- 
discriminate big-game shooting, either to feed the enormous retinue of the wealthy 
sportsman, or worse still, when hundreds of magnificent beasts are left to rot, and 
still shot down, till species after species is exterminated. The man who sports in 
this way he compares unfavourably with a marten-cat in a hen-house, who kills on 
till there is nothing left alive. Touching a young man who was about to betake 
himself on a “ shooting trip” to Africa, he growled when he was gone, “ I hope 
that when they have to go somewhere by boat, a hippopotamus will upset them, 
and that they will have to swim ashore, leaving all their rifles at the bottom of 
the Zambesi.” He goes even further than detestation of sport, and refuses to 
believe many of the stories touching the innate ferocity of certain species, and of 
their unprovoked attacks. Of man’s unprovoked attacks on certain species he 
learnt a notable instance from Mr. Bartlett, who told him that sailors have been 
known to land on islands densely peopled with penguins ; to kill or stun a 
sufficient quantity with sticks ; and then to set fire to their oily bodies, ‘for a lark.’ 
He says, “ When a schoolboy has an unfortunate owl in his power, turning its eyes 
upon him in fear of death, he takes it for ferocity, and stones the bird.” 
Space will not allow us to cite any of the passages showing 
the terms on which Wolf lives with the birds in his aviaries, or 
of the interesting details of his life. For this and for much 
more, and above all for the most admirable series of repro- 
ductions which ever illustrated the work of an artist, we must 
refer our readers to the book itself. When they have read it, 
and studied the excellent portrait which stands as its frontis- 
piece, they will know more than they have hitherto done of this 
Selbornian animal-painter, and appreciate, even more fully than 
before, his careful and artistic work. 
