THROUGH THE PLEISTOCENE 
3 
parison 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 sav¬ 
age tribes, especially of the hunting tribes, substantially 
reproduced 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 paleolithic 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 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 nat¬ 
uralist, while 
even to the 
ordinary trav¬ 
eller it teems 
with interest. 
On March 
23, 1909, 1 
sailed thither from New York, in charge of a scientific ex¬ 
pedition sent out by the Smithsonian, to collect birds, 
mammals, reptiles, and plants, but especially specimens of 
big game, for the National Museum at Washington. In 
Natives at a railway station 
From a photograph by J. A Iden Loring 
