OUR PARTY 
3 
CH. i] 
comparison is not fanciful. The teeming multitudes of 
wild creatures, the stupendous size of some of them, the 
terrible nature of others, and the low culture of many 
of the savage tribes, especially of the hunting tribes, 
substantially reproduces the conditions of life in Europe 
as it was led by our ancestors ages before the dawn of 
anything that could be called civilization. The great 
beasts that now live in East Africa were in that bygone 
age represented by close kinsfolk in Europe ; and in 
many places, up to the present moment, African man, 
absolutely naked, and armed as our early palaeolithic 
ancestors were armed, lives among, and on, and in 
constant dread of, these beasts, just as was true of the 
men to whom the cave lion was a nightmare of terror, 
and the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros possible 
but most formidable prey. 
This region, this great fragment out of the long- 
buried past of our race, is now accessible by railroad to 
all who care to go thither; and no field more inviting 
offers itself to hunter or naturalist, while even to the 
ordinary traveller it teems with interest. On March 23, 
1909, I sailed thither from New York, in charge of a 
scientific expedition sent out by the Smithsonian In¬ 
stitute, to collect birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants, 
but especially specimens of big game, for the National 
Museum at Washington. In addition to myself and 
my son Kermit (who had entered Harvard a few 
months previously), the party consisted of three 
naturalists : Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel Edgar A. 
Mearns, U.S.A., retired; Mr. Edmund Heller, of 
California ; and Mr. J. Alden Loring, of Owego, New 
York. My arrangements for the trip had been chiefly 
made through two valued English friends, Mr. Frederick 
Courteney Selous, the greatest of the world’s big-game 
