WILD LIFE AND SPORT.*
WITHOUT doubt one of the most remarkable books about wild animals that bare appeared for some time is Mr. Cherry Keartan's Wild Life Across the World.' It seems but a few years ago that his early pictures of birds were * (1) Wild Life Across the World. Written and Illustrated by Cherry Reartoa. Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt London: Hodder and Stoughton. [20s. net]—(2) Hoof and Claw. By Charles D. G. Roberts. Illustrations by raw Bransom. London: Ward, Lock and Co. [68.]—(3) The Prowlers. By F. St. Mars. Illustrated by Warwick Reynolds. London James Nisbet and Co. [6s. net.]—(1) Tigerland: Reminiscences of Forty Years' Sport and Adventure on Bengal. By C. E. Gonldstmry. With 24 Illustrations. London: Chapman and Hall. [72. 6;.11..ar:.ei () Glimpses of Indian Birds. By Douglas Dewar. London: Ran Lane. 7s. 6d. net.}—(6) Pheasants and Corert-Skooting. By Captain Aymer . London: A. and C. Black. [7s. 6d. net. 7) The Peregrine Falcon at the Eyrie. By Francis Heatherley, F.R.C.S. With Photo- graphs by the Author and C. J. King. London : Country Life. [5s. net.)—(8) hisectBiographies with Pen and Camera. By John J. Ward, F.E.S. Illustrated with photographs and micro-photographs by the Author. London : Jarrold and Sons. 6s. net.)—(9) This Realm; this ingland. By George A. B. Dewar. London: Cbatto and Windiut. [62. net.]
published ; though we learn that it was in 1892 that he first photographed a thrush's nest. In Africa, Herr Schillings was before him in attempting flashlight pictures of wild beasts. But no one has ever faced such difficulties or encountered such dangers in securing cinematograph films. Mr. Kearton must be one of the pluckiest men in the world, and was fortunate to escape with nothing worse than malaria and repeated sunstrokes. When a man has stood within a few yards of frantic lions and faced charging rhinoceroses turning the while the handle of his machine, it must be heart- breaking to find that numbers of the films proved to be failures. The present volume deals with various journeys. The first was to the home of the orang in Borneo, and ended with a visit to the Gomanton caves, where the birds' nests for soup come from. Then an African trip round Nairobi is described. Here Mr. Kearton came across Mr. Roosevelt, who writes his preface. An account of an Indian trip follows. This brings us to the most noteworthy and amazing portions of the book. The expedition started from Nairobi with eleven Europeans and some three hundred natives. Among the white men were three American cowboys, whose duty it was to ride down and lasso° the big game. It is enough in this deplorably short notice of the book to say that they accomplished all that was required of them. Antelopes, zebras, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and ultimately a lioness, were secured in the toils and photo- graphed. It is needless to add that all was not smooth and easy. But Mr. Kearton had the satisfaction of standing sometimes within twenty yards turning the film through his camera. Un- fortunately we do not see the " cinema " results in the book. There are a great number of photographs reproduced. Some are excellent. Some are wonderful, especially those of hippos and rhinos. But there are others of which one can only say that they are splendid failures—splendid when one considers the difficulties of securing them, but failures when one con- siders the high standards of modern animal photography. The text of the book is really of more interest than the illustrations. Especially thrilling is the account of lion- spearing by Masai, of which films were obtnined. After Africa, photographing beavers and moose in Canada seems tame, and even the bears and bison of Yellowstone Park are partially domesticated animals. There are a few things in the book which might have been corrected when the proofs were read. The writer on the Masai and discoverer of the gazelle which the Masai call engoli, was Thomson, not Thompson. Mr. Kearton does not profess a knowledge of Latin names, but once (p. 71) be refers to Grantia Thommi, a species of antelope that will surely puzzle the zoologist to identify. It is also a misuse of words (p. 245) to write of the moose as "web-footed."
We pass from truth to fiction, from wild animals as the naturalist-photographer found them, to wild animals as the man of letters pictures them to his readers. Those who cater for the numerous and hungry readers of animal stories are probably careful lest the supply should exceed the demand. Each season produces several fresh volumes of such stories, and each volume seemingly finds readers. Among the well- established and most popular of such writers is Mr. Charles D. G. Roberts, whose books come out with more than annual frequency. In Hoof and Claw 2 we have a number of tales written with the same restrained power, the same capacity for selecting the right word, and the same apparently intimate knowledge of the backwoods as before. Mr. Roberts is fortunate in having so inexhaustible a stock of material. He never repeats himself. Bears, bison, blue foxes, wolves, and wild sheep are his heroes, and in some of the best stories settlers, trappers, or Indians play minor parts. It would be a waste of space to praise so deservedly popular a writer.—Mr. Roberts has many rivals, but few surpass him. Mr. F. St. Mars is a rival and a vigorous writer. Mr. St. Mars at once established his reputation as an author of vivid animal stories. Of the dozen or so tales in his new volume some have already been printed in magazines. The Prowlers' will enchain the interest of the same class of readers who welcomed him from the first. He, too, has by no means exhausted his subject. He dwells on the fighting and slaughtering that are common in the world where beast and bird prey on each other. There are some admirable pages of descriptive writing in the book. He is master of a simple, concise, concentrated style that is very effective for his purpose. It is best when it avoids the trite phrases of American journalistic slang. Mr. St. Mars has evidently a good knowledge of the wild animals whose life be describes with so much ability. Rarely does he make a slip, as, for instance, when he applies the epithet " giant " to the Sandwich tern, which is only about an inch longer than the common tern. Nor do we know of any evidence that the "little red adders" are more venomous than the large brown ones. The best stories, to our mind, are those in which the animals do not talk. In some they argue and converse in a pseudo-Shakespearean English which is not convincing.
It is difficult to write anything new about Indian sport, but Tigerland4 has some good stories of tigers, leopards, and "rogue" elephants, and a little about buffaloes, bears, and ibex. There is also a tale of a wild boar which resembles that of Androcles and his lion, and a mysterious, unexplained ghost story. As sporting medleys go, the book is well written, but chronology is not apparently adhered to, and names, dates, and places are studiously veiled. Mr. C. E. Gouldsbury, the author, has already written about life in the Indian police, and in a preface which seems intended to be serious he telle us that the individual whose sporting reminiscences are here recorded from diaries and notes only consented to this compilation on condition that his name should not appear or any name that could betray him. This individual, having run away to sea at fifteen, was in India through the Mutiny, joined the police force, became a great shikari, and spent the forty years between 1857 and 1896 in Lower Bengal. Here the sporting adventures narrated by Mr. Gouldsbury mostly took place. We pass rapidly from the Mutiny to Winchester rifles, telegraphs, and cameras. The book is illustrated with good modern photographs which purport to illustrate inci- dents in the book, but the deception is too palpable to be seriously objectionable.
From Indian tigers we pass to birds. Everything that Mr. Douglas Dewar writes about Indian birds is welcome, because he is a close observer, a naturalist who thinks for himself, and expresses what he has to say in a pleasant fashion. His new book, which he calls Glimpses of Indian Birds, consists of collected articles from various Indian journals. We know nothing better to recommend to an amateur ornithologist who finds himself in India for the first time, and wants a readable sketch of the bird-life in the gardens, compounds, and villages. Huxley said that Science committed suicide when it adopted a creed. Mr. Dewar, as we have said, thinks for himself, and those who know him need not be reminded that "protective coloration" and, to a lesser degree, "natural selection" are his bugbears. He seems to think that evolutionists are stationary. We should have thought that there were few supporters of the pure Darwin-Wallace theory left. Some cling to "protec- tive mimicry," with doubt it is true, because it is the only theory in the field which offers a rational explanation. We will not accept Mr. Dewar's challenge to refute him because in the main we agree. He writes (p. 205) of the colour" which, for some occult reason, is known as isabelline." Is it possible that he has never heard of the queen and the siege of Granada?
The next book before us leads abruptly from the Indian jungle to the English covert with its hand-reared pheasants. Captain Aymer Maxwell has followed his books on the grouse and the partridge with an equally pleasant and most readable volume on Pheasants and Covert-Shooting'. He opens with a little natural history. B,y whom the pheasant was introduced is unknown. Most of our birds are now mongrels between the old black-necked bird and the Chinese white. ringed form which was imported at the end of the eighteenth century and now predominates. At Woburn, where extensive experiments have been made in acclimatizing more than a dozen rare foreign pheasants, none has proved of any use for sport except Reeves', Mongolians, and Japanese. Though no friend of Mr. Lloyd George, Captain Maxwell in writing of the damage suffered by farmers when pheasants are numerous says, "Growing turnips are at times the subject of appreciable damage." His chapter on foxes and pheasants is moderate in tone. He suggests possible compromises in the treatment of woodlands for game coverts or scientific forestry. A chapter, full of sound advice, is devoted to the care of game coverts. The details of rearing are scantily treated, but there are several useful hints. The reader should not miss the theory of Lord Verulam, in his letter (p. 199), for improving the
parental qualities of the wild pheasant by the force of example. Mr. George Rankin's pretty coloured plates add to the attractions of a well-written book by a real sportsman.
We pass from sport to ornithology pure and simple. The next book on our list contains some of the best work in bird photography that has ever been accomplished. The Pere- grine Falcon at the Eyrie is an admirable instance of what can be learnt about birds by patient observation, and Dr. Francis Heatherley is a true naturalist as well as a photo- grapher of considerable skill. During the springs of 1910, 1911, and 1912 he was at work at the same eyrie. In the last Beason he and his helpers kept the young birds under constant observation for thirteen days and nights. The old birds seem to have been strangely unsuspicious of what was passing in the observation shed. The young falcons are well described as caricatures of the late Mr. Gladstone dressed in white cotton. In the present case it is worthy of note that the whole of the feeding seems to have been done by the tiered, or male, whilst the female did the hunting. The prey was passed from talon to talon in mid-air. The food, the hours of meals and of sleep, all the daily life of the eyrie, which became a foul spot full of bluebottles, are here recorded with meritorious detail. It is needless to dwell on the value to ornithologists proper and the delight which such a record affords to lovers of birds. We have already praised the plates. Many are enlargements, but they have lost nothing of their sharpness. The book contains much practical instruction and advice on bird photography.
The next work makes a feature of insect photography. Insect Biographies with Pen and Cameras is a capital instance of a modern popular natural-history book. Mr. John J. Ward, who is a good photographer, and evidently also a patient observer, gives us in a short volume about a dozen life- histories of more or less well-known insects : the swallow-tail, purple emperor, and painted lady ; the familiar puss-moth and magpie-moth ; among less well known insects he selects the hover-fly, the lacewing-fly, the lunar hornet moth, and the death-watch beetle. There are a. few pages on spiders and on the mites which infest our common dor-beetle. He makes his subject interesting and attractive, writes well in a popular fashion, and each chapter contains a fair amount of information. Unlike Mr. Douglas Dewar, whose book we noticed above, this disciple of Professor Poulton tends to see mimicry and protective coloration everywhere. At the risk of being denounced by Mr. Ward as "learned," "tedious," and hypercritical critics, we may point out that though fleas are probably the descendants of winged insects, it is by no means demonstrated that their ancestors were "two-winged flies." There is another statement on the same page which may be corrected. No rudiments or vestiges whatever of wings exist in fleas, even in the larval state. We have not forgotten the epimeran, which was, in olden days, thought to be a vestigial wing.
We may end with a notice of a pleasing and discursive book that may appeal to those who like to read of our country, of birds, insects, plants, and village life. These essays, collected by a prolific writer from the Morning Post, are marked by the unaffected love which Mr. G. A. B. Dewar has for southern England and by the knowledge of the countryside which he possesses. This Realm, this England,s is all loud-singing praise and graceful description by a conservatively inclined naturalist and sportsman. He wants no change. He shows no sympathy with "Socialists" who would break up the squire's estate or spoil his pheasant-shooting. Our country life is based on a system of land tenure, labour, and sport that is "too finely ravelled for the gross vision of the Socialist." We open the book with "English soil" and descriptions of scenery—the cliffs and downs of Albion. Then come sketches of water-bailiffs, farmers, hurdlers, a bird-catcher, and other worthies. Then birds form the subject of the essays. Lastly comes the English sea. It is a pretty volume, pleasantly written, in smooth, gentlemanlike English, by one who has written much about "this little world, this precious atone set in the silver sea." " Cobbett," says Mr. Dewar, "was English to the core." We wonder what Cobbett would have said about Mr. Dewar's book P Yet Mr. Dewar, too, is English to the core. His book is illustrated with a few exceedingly good photographs of the sea and the coast
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