NATURE AND SPORT.* THE volumes which we propose to notice
shortly in the following review all deal with Nature and natural history in some form or another. Though several of them are not of surpassing merit as literary work in the strictest sense, and
* (1) Jungle Trails and Jungle People : Travel, Adventure, and Observa,ion in the Far East. By Caspar Whitney. London : T. Werner Laurie. [12s. net.] —(2) Northern Trails: Some Studies of Animal Life in the Far North. By William J. Long. Illustrated by Charles Copeland. London Ginn and Co. [7s. 6(1.1—(3) Red Fox : the Story of his Adventurous Career in the Ring-wash Wilds and of his Final Triumph over the Enemies of his Kind. By Charles G. D. Roberts. With many Illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull. London : Duckworth and Co. [6s. net.j—(4) Ways of Nature. By John Burroughs. London: A. Constable and Co. [5s. net.]—(5) Beasties Courageous : Studies of Animal Life and Character. By Douglas English, B.A. With 101 Illustra- tions (rein his Photographs of Living " Beasties." London: S. H. Bousfield and Co. [5s. net.]—(6) The Bird-Watcher in the Shetlands : with Some Notes on Seals; and Digressions. By Edmund Scions. With 10 Illustrations by J. Smit. London J. IL Dent and Co. [10s. 6d. net.1(7) Two Bird-Lovers in Mexico. By C. William Beebe. Illustrated with Photographs from Life taken by the Author. London : A. Constable and Co. [10s. 64. net.1—(8) Wild Wings Adventures of a Camera-Hunter among.the Larger Wild Birds of North America on Sea and Land. By Herbert Keightley Job. With 160 Illustrations after Photographs from Life by the Author. Same publishers. [10s. 65. net.] —(9( Pictures from. Nature. By Richard and Cherry Hearten. ,London : Cassell and Co. [10s. 6d.] — (10) Nature—Tones and Undertones : being Sketches of Life in the Open, I Instrated by Pho. ographs from Nature. By J. Maclair Boraston. London : Sherratt and Hughes. [Os. net.] —(11) Nature through Microscope and Camera. By Richard. item F.G.S., F.R.A.S. With 65 Photo-Micrographs by Arthur E. Smith. London : R.T.S. [6s. net.]
others depend for their attractions upon photography, our readers will be hard to please if they do not find something to their tastes among such a wide variety.
We would recommend Jungle Trails and Jungle People to all who care for an excellent book of travel, sport, and adven- ture in a part of the world about which comparatively little has been written. Siam, the Malay peninsula, and the island of Sumatra, however interesting to the observant traveller, cannot be described as happy hunting-grounds for the big- game shot. Yet there is an abundance of almost virgin country, and elephants, rhinoceroses, tapirs, buffaloes, and deer (from sambur to muntjac) in tolerable profusion when you discover the right spots. Mr. Caspar Whitney, as some of our readers know, is an American and a sportsman. He is distinguished in America as a sportsman of the most genuine sort whose blood is stirred by the wilderness and the hunting, and not by the killing of numerous beasts. Besides writing of the sport, he gives some account of the country and the people in a dozen separate chapters, each unconnected by continuous narrative. The book is illustrated with good photographs of his own taking. In Siam he joined Choo Poh Lek, the King's mahout, in trapping elephants at the great Ayuthia kraal, which is a business of many days, for the herds have to be cautiously driven. The rivers are the highways of Siam, and through the " klawngs " and tributary streams he was taken by Saw Swee Ann on a buffalo-hunting expedition to the borders of Burma. He also went with Phra Ram, the King's representative, to the Karens, a jungle folk who live along the frontier. The Siamese are not by nature hunters, and the account of the guides and the lesser folk who joined the expeditions is amusing. The chief desire of Mr. Whitney at this time was to find buffaloes, there known as " seladang," otherwise Bo s Gaurus, or the gam'. In the jungles of the Malay States he tracked rhinoceroses, hoping to secure the hairy-eared species or variety, but with little sport or success. His only elephant, shot in Sumatra after infinite trouble with the aid of Jin Abu, was not much of a trophy, for its tusks were but eighteen inches long. A more horrible country to shoot in than these forests it would be hard to imagine. Impassable and gloomy jungles, constant rain and sodden vegetation, mud over the ankles, a malarial smell, leeches, centipedes, reptiles, and every detestable sort of insect in myriads, torment the sportsman, who often has to follow the tracks on his stomach. All combine to make stalking most unpleasant. Indeed, after reading Mr. Whitney's most vivid account of his difficulties and discomforts, which he describes with hardly a complaint, we feel very little desire to try this kind of jungle hunting. But it must be confessed that new ground has attractions; and Mr. Whitney conveys to the reader a good deal of the pleasure and excitement which be himself experienced.
The next book transports us to a different sort of country, to the big woods, the barren grounds, the swift rivers of Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador. Mr. William J. Long has so firmly established himself as the most charming and veracious describer of wild animals' ways that a new book of his may be sure of a welcome. There is a certain sameness about his work, but we do not think that he has written any- thing better than Northern Trails. We are carried away to the wilderness where the wolf, the caribou, and the wild goose flourish, and white bears arrive drifting on icebergs, and salmon fill the rivers, and whales spout in the sea. We not only share the emotions of old Tomah, the Indian, and Mooka and Noel, the little redskins, but also of • Wayeesis,' the white wolf, and Malsunsis,' the cub, Upweekis,' the lynx, and all other beasts over whom Keesuolukb, the Great Mystery, watches. The attractions of this book are immensely in- creased by Mr. Copeland's astonishingly clever little drawings, which embellish almost every page.
It is impossible not to make comparison between Mr. Long's work and that of Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts. Red Fox is another animal biography, and describes the life of a fox in the back- woods of Eastern Canada. It is a good specimen of the work of a well-known author who has already published successful books of the same kind. We trace the life and career of a fox (very unlike that of an English fox, we need hardly say) from the time he is a cub, or "puppy," as Mr. Roberts chooses to call him, in the Ring-waak wilds until he is turned out of a crate into the coverts of a Hunt Club in the United States. We are glad that his cunning helps him to escape when he is hunted a few days later. The book is a long one, but the reader's interest does not flag. Jabe Smith, the Canadian farmer, and the boy who finally traps the great fox are well described. Mr. Roberts claims that be has an authentic record for all the exciting adventures in Red Fox's' life, but that his emotions are not human emotions, except in so far that a man, like a fox, is an animal. This book is illustrated with a great profusion of somewhat Japanese-looking and rather conventional but clever drawings by Mr. Charles Livingston Bull.
The question of animal intelligence, which both Mr. Long and Mr. Roberts touch upon in their respective prefaces, forms the chief subject of a small book called Ways of Nature, by Mr. John Burroughs, an American of what may be called the essay- naturalist school. He protests against the growing tendency to humanise the lower animals by attributing to them human emotions. With this protest we agree, though we do not think the tendency is a " growing " one. Rather is it the contrary. But after all, what we are pleased to call instinct, as distinguished from reason, is not opposed to intelligence; it is merely intelligence of an unconscious kind. That is Mr. Burroughs's opinion. He has thought out the subject, and what he writes is fairly interesting.
We cannot say as much for Bees ties Courageous, by Mr. Douglas English, whose rather fantastic studies of animal life and character have little more likeness to Nature than Aesop's fables. Having collected with his camera a great number of extremely good photographs (and some poor ones) of living animals, Mr. English has written stories apparently to suit them. "The Daring of the Wood- mouse" and "The Unjust Tribulations of the Toads" are the titles of two, and if the text came up to the photographs the book would be extremely entertaining. Rats, mice, weasels, martins, toads, and grasshoppers converse like human beings. In the "Keeper's Tree" we have a dramatic story of a poacher whose dog is shot by a keeper. Mr. English is an extraordinarily successful photographer of animals, and the difficulties of making mice, weasels, and the like pose before the camera, even in captivity, have been got over in a way which cannot but excite our wonder.
The Bird-Watcher in the Shetlands, by Mr. Edmund Selous, is a sadly disappointing book. We think it a pity that he did not treat these lengthy notes as rough material out of which a short book might have been written, instead of printing the exclamations and repetitions which he wrote down from day to day. We are quite certain that he ought to have corrected his errors of observation when possible, instead of leaving them, as he says in the preface, "to encourage others who may be labouring in the same field." Mr. Selma is an enthusiast who derived enormous pleasUre from wathhing the seals or the sea-birds ; but we much doubt whether readers of his book will share this enjoyment. A single extract is worth a page of criticism in this case. Mr. Selena is writing of the young guillemots :—"The other chick is gone. Yes, gone; for I go to several points from which I can see the whole of this small ledge—on a part of which only I look directly down—and from none of them can I see the second chick, which, were it there, I think I must. Without any doubt, this time, I think, it is gone, and so must have either flown or been carried down within the last twenty-four, or rather twenty-two hours; for it was here on the ledge with its parent when I went away yesterday, at two or thereabouts. There are only seven birds in all on this ledge now." There are pages and pages of this sort of writing, which seems to us valueless as a contribution either to ornithology or literature. The ten illustrations by Mr. J. Smit are hardly up to that gifted artist's usual standard of excellence.
Another enthusiast, Mr. C. William Beebe, who is Curator of Ornithology of the New York Zoological Park, in Two Bird- Lovers in Mexico describes a journey during the winter of 1903-4, which included three delightful camping trips in the country round the volcano of Colima. Mexico is an attractive country, and the account of the profusion of bird life, especially in the marshes of Chapala, is vividly written. But the book is not a work of great literary merit. There are too many exclama- tions and phrases such as "the threshold of Nature's wonder- house." Mrs. Beebe, who is the second bird-lover, has con- taibuted a chapter on "How we Did it." It contains some information on clothes, and camping outfit and travel in Mexico generally. Ladies may understand the meaning of this mysterious sentence :—" Brilliantine and alpaca make nice, cool, sensible waists." A great number of good photo_ graphs of birds, landscapes, and buildings (mostly taken by the author himself) are well reproduced, and there is a scientific appendix containing a list of birds and mammals.
Another book, though superior in several respects to the last, is also by an American, and describes adventures in North America in pursuit of birds with a camera. Mr. Herbert K. Job at the beginning of his book, IWild Wings, prints a letter from President Roosevelt, who approves the substitution of the camera for the gun, and then adds : "P.S.—But I am still something of a hunter, although a lover of wild nature first!" Mr. Job's most interesting chapters deal with the wilds of Florida, and the pelicans, ibises, egrets, and herons which nest there in thousands. We would that space allowed us to deal at greater length with this • attractive book, in which the author's extremely pleasing photographs have the rare merit of being well reproduced on unglazed paper.
In connection with the photography of wild birds, we may draw our readers' attention to Pictures from Nature (a port- folio of fifteen remarkably good photogravures), which contains some of the best work of the kind done by Mr. R. and Mr. C. Kearton. The photographs consist mainly of birds, and that of the black-throated diver is especially noteworthy. They have been enlarged without losing any- thing of their clearness, and are printed upon paper which gives them something of the softness of mezzotints. The short letterpress which accompanies each plate describes the manner in which the photograph was obtained, and Mr. Kearton does not restrain himself from boasting of the dangers and difficulties that were encountered.
The new volume which Mr. Boraston has chosen to call Nature—Tones and Undertones is more interesting than a former work which we noticed by the same writer, and a • great deal better written than many others of the kind. He .deals for the most part with his own observations of birds about the coast of Anglesey and along the shores of the Mersey. A chapter entitled "Trespassers will be Prosecuted" attacks the methods of game-preservers, and particularly the "stupid slaughter" of hand-reared pheasants and timorous hares. Though not a striking book, these observations of a naturalist, who has not allowed the text to become subsidiary to his photographs, will be read with pleasure by many.
The last work before us is called Nature through Micro- scope and Camera, and, as the name implies, Mr. Kerr has made a number of very interesting photographs of objects seen through the microscope the foundation of his book. The subjects of the plates are varied, and range from diatoms to the limbs and organs of insects, from sections of plant- stems to human blood. The letterpress which accompanies these illustrations contains a great deal of scientific informa- tion popularly expressed. Dr. G. Sims Woodhead, Professor of Pathology at Cambridge, contributes an introduction to .dispel the idea that the study of natural science is "incom- patible with the existence of a religious faith."
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