That the actual suffering witnessed and chronicled is a small part only of the whole is everywhere obvious. These books teem with cases in which the animals escape wounded, to linger for days, or perhaps weeks. We read, for instance: “I kill a big male (elephant). As to the other male and a female, I wound but lose them both after a day’s pursuit. However, as the male seemed to me to be doomed, I send four men in search of it. They return without result after passing the night out of doors. I found this elephant dead on the 26th”--that is, after seventeen days in a climate where bodies do not lie long on the ground. We can quite believe that this author does not overstate the case when he candidly admits: “A good hunter, however careful, adroit, or well seconded he may be, must count one out of every two animals which he pursues as lost, owing to the many difficulties of his profession. This is the minimum, for how many wound or miss three or four animals before killing one!” PRIMITIVE INSTINCTS. It remains only to say a few words about the morality of this form of amusement. It is often said amongst humane people that hunting is only a relic of more barbarous times, but it seems to us to be something more than this. It may have taken its origin with primitive man, but it has certainly made important developments of its own in recent times. There is little in common between the act of the primitive savage, who, for the sake of his food, pitted his strength and skill against an animal, and the wholesale and reckless slaughter, aided by the appliances of modern science, and carried on merely for the pleasure of killing. Acts otherwise disagreeable and disgusting may sometimes be justified by the motive, but a search through several volumes devoted to this sport has failed to reveal any more exalted motive than the desire for trophies--as they are called--to show to admiring friends, and the love of killing. “At daylight we start on the trail, on which there are spots of blood, followed by spurts and large clots. When we see that, ‘the heart laughs,’ as the natives say, and victory is almost certain.” We learn that “to bring down an animal as big as an omnibus horse with each barrel, to roll it over as though it were a rabbit, is a pleasure which one does not often experience”; and we are also told how the author had “the pleasure of looking at a magnificent maneless lion stretched in a pool of blood.” Of the real motive there can unfortunately be little doubt, and the excuses that are made by the perpetrators for their murderous work are hardly worthy of serious consideration. The moral defences for this kind of sport are of the same nature as the famous snakes in Iceland--there are none; and the flounderings of the big-game hunter, when he tries to defend himself, show that his ethics and theology are of the same primitive kind as are his other springs of action, handed down from barbarous ancestors.