THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 
5 
care of the custom-houses in San Domingo, or serving in 
the army of occupation in Cuba. Moreover, I felt as if I 
knew most of them already, for they might have walked out 
of the pages of Kipling. But I was not as well prepared for 
the corresponding and equally interesting types among the 
Germans, the planters, the civil officials, the officers who 
had commanded, or were about to command, white or na¬ 
tive troops; men of evident power and energy, seeing whom 
made it easy to understand why German East Africa has 
thriven apace. They are first-class men, these English and 
Germans; both are doing in East Africa a work of worth 
to the whole world; there is ample room for both, and no 
possible cause for any but a thoroughly friendly rivalry; and 
it is earnestly to be wished, in the interest both of them and 
of outsiders, too, that their relations will grow, as they ought 
to grow, steadily better—and not only in East Africa but 
everywhere else. 
On the ship, at Naples, we found Selous, also bound 
for East Africa on a hunting trip; but he, a veteran whose 
first hunting in Africa was nearly forty years ago, cared only 
for exceptional trophies of a very few animals, while we, on 
the other hand, desired specimens of both sexes of all the 
species of big game that Kermit and I could shoot, as well 
as complete series of all the smaller mammals. We be¬ 
lieved that our best work of a purely scientific character 
would be done with the mammals, both large and small. 
No other hunter alive has had the experience of Selous; 
and, so far as I now recall, no hunter of anything like his 
experience has ever also possessed his gift of penetrating 
observation joined to his power of vivid and accurate nar¬ 
ration. He has killed scores of lion and rhinoceros and 
