28 JUNE 1873, Page 23

The Lion and the Elephant. By Charles John Andersson. Edited

by -L. Lloyd. (Hurst and Blackett.)—Mr. Andersson, like many other African travellers who accomplished numerous feats of exploration and .of sport, and who made large additions to our knowledge of the great continent, had not the gift of writing well. Ho made the least of his materials,—very dull books out of very remarkable exploits. His style was heavy and colourless, and something of the monotony of the waggons and the bullocks infected his modes of vision and of speech, as his books interpreted them. Probably, to an explorer, his rate of pro- -gross per diem is a subject of supreme interest, but the general reader does not share that sentiment, and Mr. Andersson was very tiresome, -with his exact statements of the distances "tracked," made in precisely the same tone as his account of a fire in the bash or the crossing of a torrent-swollen river. The present work, compiled from the voluminous

papers and notes which he left behind him when he "ended his days miserably in the wilds," by Mr. Lloyd, is much less dull than its pre- decessors. It has been, on the whole, well edited, though it might have been weeded of extracts from Gordon Cumming's African sporting-books with advantage. The lion stories are good, and the chapters devoted to the natural history of the royal brute are well and carefully written. but they, too, are overladen with extracts from Gerard. The second portion of the book, devoted to the elephant, is also interesting, but, with the exception of its hunting stories, not novel. Sir Emerson Tenhant exhausted the subject.