AFRICAN NATURE NOTES AND REMINISCENCES

With a foreword by President Roosevelt, and illustrations by E. Caldwell.

xxx, 356 pages, frontispiece, 12 plates, original brick red cloth with gilt titling on spine, top edge gilt. The cloth is insect scarred and faded, signature of a previous owner on the front free endpaper, the text is clean and bright.

Czech: An annotated Bibliography of African Big Game hunting Books, 1785 to 1950, page 146, ‘A wide-ranging work that discusses everything from the colouration of African big game to the extinction of some species in South Africa. There are plenty of big-game hunting episodes, which Selous uses to accent his chapters on Cape buffalo, black rhinoceros, and lion, among others. Written at a time when there was a noticeable depletion of the great game herds, he becomes almost lyrical in his longing for the old days: “but no man will even again sit by a camp fire near one of the little rivers…eating prime pieces of fat elephants heart, roasted on a forked stick, nor watch the great white rhinoceroses coming to drink just before dark, nor lie and listen to herd after herd of elephants drinking and bathing in the river near the camp”.’