In all these books the one point to be insisted on is that a big game hunter has nothing in common with so many of the men who delight to call themselves sportsmen. Sir Samuel Baker has left a very amusing record of the horror he felt for the Ceylon sportsmen who, by the term “sport,” meant horse-racing instead of elephant shooting. Half a century ago, Gordon-Cumming wrote of “the life of the wild hunter, so far preferable to that of the mere sportsman”; and his justification for this somewhat sneering reference to the man who takes his sport in too artificial a manner, may be found in the pages of a then noted authority on such sports as horse-racing and fox-hunting; for in Apperly’s “Nimrod Abroad,” in the course of an article on the game of the American wilderness, there occurs this delicious sentence: “A damper, however, is thrown over all systems of deer-stalking in Canada by the necessity, which is said to be unavoidable, of bivouacking in the woods instead of in well-aired sheets!” Verily, there was a great gulf between the two men. In the present century the world has known three great hunting-grounds: Africa, from the equator to the southernmost point; India, both farther and hither; and North America west of the Mississippi, from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. The latter never approached either of the former in the wealth and variety of the species, or in the size and terror of the chief beasts of the chase; but it surpassed India in the countless numbers of the individual animals, and in the wild and unknown nature of the hunting-grounds, while the climate and surroundings made the conditions under which the hunter worked pleasanter and healthier than those in any other land.