There are good descriptions of big game hunting in the books of writers like Catlin, but they come in incidentally. Elliott’s “South Carolina Field Sports” is a very interesting and entirely trustworthy record of the sporting side of existence on the old Southern plantations, and not only commemorates how the planters hunted bear, deer, fox, and wildcat on the uplands and in the canebrakes, but also gives a unique description of harpooning the great devil-fish in the warm Southern waters. John Palliser, an Englishman, in his “Solitary Hunter,” has given us the best descriptions of hunting in the far West, when it was still an untrodden wilderness. Another Englishman, Ruxton, in two volumes, has left us a most vivid picture of the old hunters and trappers themselves. Unfortunately, these old hunters and trappers, the men who had most experience in the life of the wilderness, were utterly unable to write about it; they could not tell what they had seen or done. Occasional attempts have been made to get noted hunters to write books, either personally or by proxy, but these attempts have not as a rule been successful. Perhaps the best of the books thus produced is Hittell’s “Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter.” The first effort to get men of means and cultivation in the Northern and Eastern States of the Union to look at field sports in the right light was made by an Englishman who wrote over the signature of Frank Forrester. He did much for the shotgun men; but, unfortunately, he was a true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports, and he was afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial and terminology than to the thing itself. He was sincerely distressed because the male of the ordinary American deer was called a buck instead of a stag; and it seemed to him to be a matter of moment whether one spoke of a “gang” or a “herd” of elk.