Travel and Adventure in the Congo Free State, and its
Big-Game Shooting. By Bula N' mu. (Chapman and Hall.) —Even the modern Nimrod must, we think, grow weary of the profusion of books on game-shooting which continue week by week to issue from the press. Sport properly so called, has however a fascination, even in the description, which is unknown save to the Anglo-Saxon race, and each fresh volume on the subject is welcomed by a large circle of readers. The present work forms a record of several years of big-game shooting in Africa by a man who was beyond doubt singularly successful,—an unerring shot, and a very keen hunter. It is, however, marred by very serious blemishes. The grammar is throughout faulty—in places execrable—while the absence of any names of the smaller game deprives the book of its main interest to the real sportsman and lover of Nature, Such, records as,—" I shot a few antelopes of a dark reddish brown with small horns I also bagged some smaller antelopes of a slate-colour,"—are merely irritating, and cause the reader to wish that the author before sitting down to write a book had taken the trouble to spend at least an hour or two at
the Zoo or the Natural History Museum, and take the trouble to identify the species with which he was familiar. The record of sport would then have read less like a "butcher's bill." The
absence of description of the habits, location, and peculiarities of game, together with numerous passages of which the following may be taken as a fair type, leave in the sportsman's mind a strong feeling of disappointment on the one hand, and of dis- satisfaction, almost incredulity, on the other.
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