NATIVE HUNTERS KILLING SOKOS.
To the naturalist Africa opens a field for research equalled by no other continent. The whole organic world offers no such number of giant animal and plant forms. It unfolds five times as many quadrupeds as Asia, and three times as many as the Americas. Its colossal hippopotami, huge giraffes, infinite variety of antelopes, and water-bucks, the curious diving sheep, or goat, called the Quichobo, long armed apes, fierce sokos, and swarms of sprightly monkeys, excel those of Asia in size. That mammoth bird, the ostrich, whose feathers delight our modern slaves of fashion, is exclusively indigenous to Africa. The Arab may have brought the camel from the deserts of Sinai, but Africa has made a home for it. Africa is the habitat of the rhinoceros, elephant, lion, panther, leopard, ounce, jackal, hyena, wolf, fox, dog, cat, bat, rat, hare, rabbit, bear, horse, ass, zebra, sheep, with wool and without, goat, buffalo, gazelle, cattle of all kinds, some of them the finest specimens in nature, deer of the fallow type, which put to shame the sleek breeds of European parks.
AFRICAN ANT-EATER.
TERRIFIC FIGHT OF JUNGLE MONARCHS.
AFRICAN QUICHOBO.
The birds are equally numberless as to variety. There are eagles, hawks, flamingoes, kingfishers, many varieties of parrots, peacocks, partridges, pheasants, widow and cardinal birds, weavers, cuckoos, doves, pigeons, ducks, geese, and crown-birds, the plumage of the last being the most beautiful of the feathered tribe. The
reptilia embraces crocodiles, the python, the boa and hundreds of smaller snakes, some harmless and some highly venomous. The rivers and lakes swarm with fish, though the variety is not so great as in more northern waters. The forests and the earth swarm with termites and ants of great variety, which draw after them a host of ant-eaters of the armadillo type; and at times spiders, caterpillars, and armies of locusts infest the trees or darken the sun. Insect life knows no limit in Africa—some the most beautiful, some the most horrid. The tsetse fly is no less a torment to cattle than the “devil of the road” is to the woe-begone traveler. And everywhere, especially in tropical Africa, vegetation has a force and vigor peculiar to