Some Books
of the Week -
WHEN one remembers the awful ravages that have been made on the big game of South Africa, largely by skin-hunting goers, one would hardly credit that people with being the first to realize the importance of protecting wild life. But as early as 1898 the Transvaal under President Kruger did establish a game-preserve in the south-east corner of the State, and the area of the preserve has now been extended to include prac- tically the whole of the eastern border under the name of the Kruger National Park. This and the adjoining country up to the eastern foothills of the Drakensberg Chain is the region described, and magnificently described, by Lt.-Col. Stevenson- Hamilton in The Low Veld (Cassell, 12s. 6d.). Scourged with malaria and its more awful congener, blackwater fever, with a poor, shallow soil covered in part with dwarf forest and inter- spersed with granite kopjes, with few mineral prospects and hardly any roads—the country holds out few inducements to European settlement, as little as it did a hundred years back when it saw the extinction of the first effort of the Boer Voortrekkers. But, thanks to wise protection, it has become a paradise for game. The author has been in charge of the district for over five-and-twenty years, and knows it and loves it—its beasts and birds and native peoples ; and therefore it is that he has eminently succeeded in producing a book which realizes for us (in the words of General Smuts' foreword) " the mysterious eerie Spirit which broods over this vast solitude." * • *
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