His description of other features of this vast region is full of interest. The two remarkable belts of forest, called the cross timbers, stretching for a hundred miles through a trackless country, but not increasing their width beyond their normal eight to twelve miles; the extraordinary rivers, half sand, half water, the mazes of which confound the Indian, usually so acute in the field; the sand streams, which repeat in that material the puzzle of the cross timbers, and are even more inexplicable. While the desert does not narrow the cross timber belts, nor water widen them, the wind seems to have no effect on these sand streams, though the material that composes them is so light as to rise on every puff of air. Like the cross timbers, the sand streams pursue their way across the country, regarding neither wet nor dry, hill nor stream. Their origin lies in forces not yet known, and though they may seem to be the sport of existing conditions, they really maintain themselves indifferent to their surroundings. Things like these prove that Americans need not go to the Sahara for novel aspects of nature. Our author has a quick perception of what is striking in these scenes, and describes them in vigorous and pictorial language. Colonel Dodge is one of the most noted hunters in our army, and his descriptions of the chase deserve to rank with those of Cummings, Baker, and other great African sportsmen. It is true our country does not afford the hunter such a slaughter field as South Africa has been. A few animals have increased on our soil to such an extent as to afford at certain seasons opportunities for unlimited slaughter. But the past five years have seen such destruction of the last of these--the buffalo--that wholesale killing is no longer possible on any ground the white man is suffered to visit. Three years more will carry us to the end of the decade, and probably of the buffalo hunt as it has been in the past. About five years ago a change came over the pursuit of this animal. He began to be killed for his hide alone, and the results are almost incredible. Colonel Dodge shows that in three years no less than 4,373,730 buffalo were killed by whites and Indians. It is evidently impossible for any animal, bringing forth but one at a birth, to maintain its increase against such heedless destruction. The present winter has witnessed what is probably the last grand attack upon these animals, as they took refuge in the sheltering mountains of northwestern Texas from the cold and snow-covered plains. Very soon the noblest prey of the sportsman on this continent will be one of his rarest prizes. Colonel Dodge does not lack the usual hunter's fund of anecdote. His own adventures are modestly told, and when "seven antelope and a fine dog" are bagged with one shot, the story is credited (with the Colonel's guarantee) to an anonymous "old hunter"! We have said that the plains do not rival the African field in quantity of game, but the dimensions of