January 20, 1915. Dungeness Spit Reservation. Embraces an arm of land extending into the Straits of Juan de Fuca, in township thirty-one north, ranges three and four west of Willamette Meridian, Washington.
By executive order of March 19, 1913, the protection of native birds within the Panama Canal Zone was established, the jurisdiction over same to lie with the Isthmian Canal Commission and its successor, the governor of the Canal Zone, and on January 27, 1914, an amendatory executive order was issued prohibiting night hunting, the use of spring-guns and traps, etc., with additional penalties therefor.
LIFE-HISTORIES OF AFRICAN GAME ANIMALS
By
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
AND
EDMUND HELLER
With over 125 illustrations from drawings by Philip R. Goodwin and from photographs, and with 40 faunal maps. Two volumes. Royal 8vo, 798 pp. Price $10.00 net.
The "Life-Histories of African Game Animals" represents the first attempt to deal with the giant animals of Africa substantially along the lines of Dr. Hart Merriam's volume on the mammals of the Adirondacks and of Mr. Thompson Seton's two volumes on the mammals of Manitoba. It is the first attempt that has ever been made in the field of productive scientific scholarship as regards the big animals of any continent; and Africa is the continent which in variety, numbers, and interest of the great game on the whole surpasses even Asia and vastly surpasses any other continent. The book is of interest to the professional scientist, to the scientific layman, and to the intelligent sportsman.
No book of this kind could be written unless by a man who is not only a trained scientist but an accomplished field-naturalist and observer and a successful big-game hunter and wanderer in the wilderness. In addition to all these qualifications the writer should be a man of letters, able to write with interest of that which he has seen. No single man combining these qualities and with the necessary experience to deal with the big game of a continent has yet appeared, and no book like the present one has ever been written. There are plenty of compilations by closet naturalists about the large animals of different regions, and a multitude of books on hunting and travel; but in the present case two men have joined to do what neither could have done separately, and the result is a book which is a model of what should be done for all other continents and also for the great West African forest and the North African desert, neither of which is covered by the present work.
The volume contains photographs of almost every species described; maps showing the distribution of each species; photographs of the distinctive vegetation; and also maps of the faunal areas and life-zones of east equatorial Africa. There are also drawings to illustrate the wild life as it could not be illustrated by photographs.
The life-histories of game animals offer an almost virgin field for investigation and study. The present treatise is a faithful account of what Messrs. Roosevelt and Heller have themselves observed. It is a fuller account than has ever before been submitted on the subject. But the authors themselves emphatically state that its greatest value must lie in its being treated primarily as a suggestion of what is still open for discovery in the vast field that treats not only of the physical traits but of the queer psychology of mammals and of the way in which their life-habits are modified by their surroundings. Big-game hunters who are more than illiterate game-butchers, and faunal naturalists who realise that outdoor work is at least as important to the scientist as work in the laboratory, and all intelligent men who, without being scientists, are interested in scientific matters as well as in the most interesting, the hugest, and the most terrible of the beasts of the chase will find in this book what cannot anywhere else be found.