APPENDICES 
415 
To carry the war straight into the enemies’ camp (which, 
I read, is a sound military maxim), our friends, the enemy 
aforesaid, have quoted against us several big-game hunters as 
conforming to their theories. 
The reply is that there have always been hunters—many of 
them “hard-bitten” and highly skilled in their craft—who 
neither profess to study natural phenomena nor aspire to any 
living interest in the animals they hunt beyond securing 
“record heads”—-more’s the pity! Such men, on reading 
articles propounded by our acknowledged authorities, and 
clothed in terms as precise as they are fascinating, not un¬ 
reasonably mistake hypothetical propaganda for proved facts. 
In blind faith they accept a mere thesis as an established law 
of Nature. Who is to “cast the first stone”? The delinquents 
include personal friends, and were I allowed, without offence, 
to impute blame, it would be on the lines that, when these 
innocent “ Babes in the Wood ” enjoy subsequent opportunities 
to put that blind faith to the test, the whole subject is utterly 
forgotten ! 
Now, should any self-conscious culprit read my book, let 
him forgive me straightaway; let him admit that the above is 
the simple truth ; and promise to remember my humble hint! 
Let every hunter in African wilds realise that it is in this 
twentieth century a bounden duty incumbent upon him to 
add, so far as in him lies, to our knowledge of an animal- 
fauna which, while still in the full glory of existence, may 
to future generations be but as a closed volume or a dream 
that is gone. 
Well, we start with a “clean slate.” Inscribe in one corner 
all that array of lowly life—reptilian, crustacean, insect, and other 
—which spends its ephemeral existence practically sedentary. 
Such a schedule comprises caterpillars and chameleons; 
tortoises, tree-frogs, snails; wood-lice; bats and butterflies 
at rest; moths, mantis, stick-insects, and thousands more of 
that ilk. The sole protection of most of these lies virtually in 
of the American Museum of Natural History , New York, August 1911, which 
is almost equally illuminative, but presenting to British students a difficulty 
in that many examples are selected from transatlantic subjects which may 
not be so familiar to ourselves. Another notable name is that of Major 
C. H. Stigand. Alas ! that all these three should already have passed away. 
