The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teeming wealth of strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, and in places must still be, about what one’s experience would be if one could suddenly go back a few hundred thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or Pleistocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler’s book, “Through Jungle and Desert,” the record of his trip through the melancholy reed beds of the Guaso Nyiro, and of his return journey, carrying his wounded companion, through regions where the caravan was perpetually charged by rhinoceros, reads like a bit out of the unreckoned ages of the past, before the huge and fierce monsters of old had vanished from the earth, or acknowledged man as their master. An excellent book of mixed hunting and scientific exploration is Mr. Donaldson Smith’s “Through Unknown African Countries.” If anything, the hunting part is unduly sacrificed to some of the minor scientific work. Full knowledge of a new breed of rhinoceros, or a full description of the life history and chase of almost any kind of big game, is worth more than any quantity of matter about new spiders and scorpions. Small birds and insects remain in the land, and can always be described by the shoal of scientific investigators who follow the first adventurous explorers; but it is only the pioneer hunter who can tell us all about the far more interesting and important beasts of the chase, the different kinds of big game, and especially dangerous big game; and it is a mistake in any way to subordinate the greater work to the lesser. Books on big game hunting in India are as plentiful, and as good, as those about Africa. Forsyth’s “Highlands of Central India,” Sanderson’s “Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India,” Shakespeare’s “Wild Sports of India,” and Kinloch’s “Large Game Shooting,” are perhaps the best; but there are many other writers, like Markham, Baldwin, Rice, Macintyre, and Stone, who are also very good. Indeed, to give even a mere list of the titles of the good books on Indian shooting would read too much like the Homeric catalogue of ships, or the biblical generations of the Jewish patriarchs. The four books singled out for special reference are interesting reading for anyone; particularly the accounts of the deaths of man-eating tigers at the hands of Forsyth, Shakespeare, and Sanderson, and some of Kinloch’s Himalayan stalks. It is indeed royal sport which the hunter has among the stupendous mountain masses of the Himalayas, and in the rank jungles and steamy tropical forests of India. Hunting should go hand in hand with the love of natural history, as well as with descriptive and narrative power. Hornaday’s “Two Years in the Jungle” is especially interesting to the naturalist; but he adds not a little to our knowledge of big game. It is earnestly to be wished that some hunter will do for the gorilla what Hornaday has done for the great East Indian ape, the mias or orang.