Among the Birds, one of the most interesting is the beautiful goatsucker (Caprimulgus eximius simplicior), for, although a slightly different subspecies, it illustrates once more the fact that many species inhabit a belt south of the Sahara from N.E. Africa across the African Continent to West Africa, while most of the forms north and south of that belt do not show such a wide range from east to west.
Among the Lepidoptera, the most interesting species are all true “desert” forms, with a wide range reaching through Arabia into India, although several new species and sub-species of butterflies and moths of great interest are also in the collection.
From a zoo-geographical point of view the collection is most valuable, for we now know zoologically a complete section of the “Great Saharan Desert,” with the exception of the small portion between the Ahaggar Mountains and Asben, and although the region of the Sahara south of the former is undoubtedly tropical, and not palæarctic, in its fauna, it is very remarkable what a large number of palæarctic species and genera are still to be found there. Unlike most of the collecting-grounds of the Old World, which can still yield new and undescribed forms, Asben and its neighbourhood were absolutely virgin soil zoologically, and Captain Buchanan’s specimens are the first to reach the hands of scientific workers. Considering the long journey by camel and the fact that Captain Buchanan was working absolutely single-handed, the collecting of over 1,100 Birds and Mammals and over 2,000 Lepidoptera, in a region notorious for its paucity, both of species and individuals, is a remarkable achievement, and proves him to be a most efficient explorer and naturalist.
Rothschild.
Tring Museum,
March 22nd, 1921.
OUT OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER I
ENGAGING BOYS—LAGOS
It was at Seccondee on the Gold Coast that “John” came aboard. Do not mistake me!—he was not a first-class passenger nor an acquaintance. Far from it; he was one of a motley crowd of jabbering natives which, with an extraordinary conglomeration of hand-carried household belongings, were put aboard from surf boats and herded on to the open after-deck—already stacked with sacks of Kola nuts from Sierra Leone—like so many head of frightened sheep.
No! John was certainly not of a race or rank to claim intimate acquaintance. In the first place he was as black as the ace of spades, which in itself for ever barred him from any claim to equality or kinship—a hard plain fact which any old colonial on “The Coast” or anywhere in Africa would endorse, while with grave misgivings regretting the extraordinary policy and laws that grow, from what sane source is past understanding, more and more lenient in their evident stiffness of opinion to release native inhabitants of our colonies from the slightest restraint of a dominant European rulership; policy that is reacting— surely not with short-sighted blindness?—to bring about the downfall of the fine old decorum of the white man’s prestige which natives naturally observed in every respect in the past. And it would be well to remember, those singular innovations which are being brought in on the tide of European civilisation are being entrusted to natives who are endowed by nature with characteristics of a different race type to ours and which are irrevocably unchangeable at the line of their limitations. European education and European laws along certain well-chosen, sure-set lines can cultivate those characteristics of the native to a certain standard—but not one step further. It is the logic of Nature: up to a point, with many creatures and plants and even matter, artificial cultivation is possible and beneficial; but over-experiment with the material, over-nurture and Nature steps in and calls a decisive halt in this tampering with her creations, and death or decline is thenceforth observed.