There are few of us whose early aspirations and subsequent acts are not influenced by literature. Some book comes just at the time of our life when we are most impressionable and seems exactly to fit in with our ideas and temperament. To this rule Selous was no exception, for he often admitted in after-life that the one book which definitely sent him to Africa and made him a pioneer and a hunter of Big Game, was Baldwin's "African Hunting from Natal to the Zambesi," published in 1864. Example in any line of adventure is recurrent, and especially so if the field of adventure is not spoilt by what we may call excessive "civilization." There have been, as it were, landmarks in the literature of African sport and travel, each book being more or less cumulative in its effect. Amongst books that mattered, perhaps the first was Burchell's fully-illustrated folio and the lesser writings of an English officer who hunted in the Orange Free State late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth century. The works of these men incited Captain Cornwallis Harris to undertake an extensive trip as far as the Limpopo. He was a capable artist and an excellent writer, and published a magnificent folio describing his adventures and the natural history of the large mammals, which still commands a high price. He at once inspired many hunters to follow in his footsteps, and several of these, such as Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, William Cotton Oswell, Sir Francis Galton, and C. J. Anderson, wrote either books of great value or portions of standard works. Gordon Cumming did an immense amount of shooting--far too much most people now think--but his volume, written in the romantic British style, is one that will always remain a classic in the world of sporting literature. His tales of the game he saw or what he killed were not always accepted as true facts, but from all accounts, gathered from independent sources, it is now admitted that Gordon Cumming was a fearless hunter and did in the main accomplish all the principal exploits to which he laid claim.