A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open

sualize even this fact to ourselves; and we laymen, at least, often either disregard or else frankly forget the further fact that this statement is equally true as regards the prehistory o

century that came a thousand years before or a thousand years later. In prehistory and paleon

he seventh century. It had no relation to the contemporary body politic of humanity except that of being a plague-spot. The Tasmanians, Bushmen, and Esquimaux of the eighteenth century had

d in both the Americas, in what paleontologists call the Pleistocene age. By Pleistocene is meant that period-of incalculable length as we speak of historic time, but a mere moment if we speak of geologic time-which witnessed in Europe and Asia the slow chan

thout some knowledge of his prehistory. Moreover, the history of the rest of the animal world also yields a drama of intense and vivid interest to all scholars gifted with imagination. The two histories-

nds, where my people now dwell, and the northern lands of the eastern world, where their remote forefathers once dwelt, were filled with just such a wild life. In those days these far-back ancestors of ours led the same lives of suspicion and vigilant cunning among the beasts of the forest and plain that are now led by the wildest African savages. In that immemorial past the beasts conditioned the lives of men, as they

sewhere we came on one or two camping-places with rude brush shelters. Each little party consisted of a family, or perhaps temporarily of two or three families. They did not cultivate the earth; they owned a few dogs; and they lived on honey and game. They killed monkeys and hyraxes, occasionally forest hog and bongo-a beautifully striped forest antelope as big as a Jersey cow-and now and then elephant, rhino, and buffalo, and, on the open plains at the edge of the forest, zebra. The zebra was a favorite food; but they could only get at it when it left the open plains and came among the bushes or to drink at the river. Two of these wild hunters showed me the bones of an elephant they had killed in a pit a long time previously; and the head man of those we had with us on another trip bore the scars of frightful wounds inflicted by an angered buffalo. Hyenas at times haunted the neighborhood, and after nightfall might attempt to carry off a child or even a sleeping man. Very rarely the hunters killed a leopard, and sometimes a leopard pounced on one of them. The lion they feared greatly, but it did not enter the woods, and they were in danger from it only if they ventured on the plain. The head man above mentioned told us that once, when desperate with hunger, his little tribe, or family group, had found a buffalo killed by a lion, and had attacked and slain the lion, and then feasted on bo

the advent of the latter, and as a rule were found only in isolated tracts which were useless for tillage or pasturage, the dense forest forming their habitual dwelling-place and retreat of safety. From the best huntin

dotted with clumps of low thorn-trees or broken by barren, boldly outlined hills. Our camp might be pitched by a muddy pool, with only stunted thorns near by; or on the edge of a shrunken river, under the dense shade of some great, brilliantly green fig-tree; or in a grove of huge, flat-topped acacias with yellow

as hideous as nightmares ploughed along with their fore knees on the ground as they rooted it up. Sleek oryx with horns like rapiers galloped off with even, gliding gait. Shaggy wildebeests curvetted and plunged with a ferocity both ludicrous and sinister; elands as heavy as prize cattle trotted away with shaking dewlaps. Ungainly hartebeests, and topi whose skins had the sheen of satin, ran with smooth speed. The lyre-horned waterbuck

s had to be shifted from its point of march, to avoid a rhinoceros which stared at us with dull and truculent curiosity; while the zebra herds filed off with barking cries across the sunlit plain, and delicate gazelles, dainty as wood-sprites, fled like shadows, and

. The spectators included wildebeest, hartebeest, gazelle, topi, a zebra, and a rhinoceros-the hook-lipped kind. Late that afternoon I shot a lioness; the successive reports of the rif

longer ears and more numerous and narrower stripes. The herd advanced, avoiding cover as much as possible, continually halting, once wheeling and galloping back, ever seeking with eye and nostril some token of the presence of their maned and tawny foe. At last the leader walked down through a break in the bank to the river. The others crowded close behind, jostling one another as they sank their muzzles in the water. For a moment fear left them, and they satisfied their thirst, and those that were through first then stood while the rearmost drank greedily. But as soon as one of them began to move back to the shore the others became uneasy and followed, and the whole herd broke into a gallop and tore off for a couple of hundred yards. Looking at them it was easy enough to bring before one's eyes the tragedy of the preceding night; the herd nearing the water, wary, but not wary enough, the panic flight as the lion dashed among them, the struggling and the neighing screams of the victim before the great teeth found the life t

f giraffes, some solitary old wildebeest bulls, showing black against the bleached yellow grass, and herds of hartebeest, topi, big and little gazelle, and zebra. On another occasion, when with Kermit, we inspected three rhinos at close quarters, came to the conclusion tha

the exhaust-pipes of huge steam-engines. Next day I hunted the giant square-mouth rhinoceros, killing a cow and a bull, and taking their skins and the skeleton of one for the Smithsonian. On the walk out, and but a mile or two from camp, we had

bay, I walked in on him. In the background the barren hills, "like giants at a hunting lay." Bands of hartebeests and of showy zebras, joined by grotesquely capering wildebeests and by lovely, long-horned gazelles, stood round in a wide, irregular ring, to see their two foes fight to the death. Another day, at burning noon, in a waste of

I spent days with hunters whose lives were led under conditions that the people of my race had not faced for ages; probably not since before, certainly not since immediately after, the close of the last glacial epoch. The number and variety of the great game,

on the earth. But three of the most characteristic of these beasts, the lion, the elephant, and the horse, were spread over almost the whole of this planet at the time when man as man had fairly begun his hunting. These thre

cently extinct hairy elephant of the north, which was more closely related to the Asiatic elephant than the latter is to its African cousin, and although we use the word "mastodon" to denote a more primitive type of elephant also recently extinct in America. We have no such common term either for the various big cats or for the various horses. Yet the African and Asiatic elephants are far more widely separated from one another than the lion is from the tiger, or even from the jaguar. They are far more widely separated than horses, asses, and zeb

broad sense so as to avoid circumlocution. I use them in exactly the way in which "elephant" is always used to include the two totally distinct species now living in India and Africa. By "lion" I mean any one of the big extinct cats, true cats, which in their cranial and skeletal characters are almost or quite identical with living lions and tigers and closely related to living ja

rse, the Lion, and the Elephant, and the two ages overlapped for a very long period. The lion was primitive man's most deadly foe, as to this day is the case in parts of Africa. He feared the lion, and avoided him, and warred upon him, until gradually he got a little the upper hand of him. The elephant greatly impressed the imagination of this primitive man, and it still greatly impresses it; as will be seen by any one who studies the carvings and pictures of our ancestors of the glacial and postglacial epochs, or who at the present day listens to the talk of his black gun-bearers round an African camp-fire. The horse w

terminology to express successive stages of the world's growth, and therefore successive and varying faunas. They are not equivalent in time to one another; the more remote the age from our own the greater is the length of time we include therein. "Recent" denotes a short period of time compared to "Pleistocene," and "Pleistocene" a short period compared to "Pliocene." If there are on this earth intelligent beings at a time in the future as remote from our day as our day is from the Pliocene, they will certainly consider "Recent" and "Pleistocene" as one short period. All the beast faunas and all the human cultures from the eras of the chinless Heidelberg and Piltdown men to our own time will seem in that remote perspective

nd have disappeared from Europe and the two Americas thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, so it may well be that they had died out in North America ages before they had disappeared from the other end of the western hemisphere. Again, in North America, it is as yet quite impossible to be sure as to the exact succession, or contemporaneity of all of the many extinct species of horse and e

ces. Nevertheless, there were sharp differences in the successive cultures of this period; even the two centuries which intervened, say, between Miltiades and Demetrius Poliorketes, or between Marius and Trajan, showed such differences. Dealing roughly with the period as a whole, it would not be necessary to try to draw all the distinctions and make all the qualifications th

man and then of man himself. It is in Eurasia that all of the remains of man's immediate predecessors have been found-from the Javan pithecanthropus which can only doubtfully be called human, to the Piltdown and Heidelberg men, who were undoubtedly human, but who were so much closer than any existing savage to the beasts that (unless our present imperfect knowledge proves erroneous) they can hardly be deemed specifically identical with modern homo sapiens. Even the more modern Neanderthal men are probably not ancestral to our own stock. It is in Europe, following on these predecessors of existing man, that we find the skeletons, the weapons and tools, and the carvings of existing man in his earliest stages; and mingled with his remains those of the strange and mighty beasts which dwelt beside him in the land. Probably these European forefathers of exist

rst penetrated from there to northwestern America-and that more remotely they may be kin to certain late Pal?olithic men of Europe. But much of the American Indian culture was essentially a Neolithic culture, seemingly from the beginning. In places-Peru, Maya-land, the Mexican plateau-it at times developed into a civilization equally extraordinary for its ac

robably of all big ruminants the one that most readily lends itself to domestication. But none of them was tamed until tribes owning animals which had been tamed for ages appeared in Africa; and then the already-tamed animals were accepted in their stead. The asses, cattle, sheep, and goats of Asia a

history of man in Africa and North America. One of the incidents in this parallelism is the way in which the inhabitants accepted animals already trained and brought from elsewhere rather than attempt to train the similar beasts of their own forests. Doubtless the reason why the European bison is not a domestic animal is exactly the same as the reason why the American bison and African

l conditions again became what they once had been. At certain periods the musk-ox, the reindeer, the woolly rhinoceros, and the hairy mammoth, together with huge cave-bears, were found; at other periods southern forms of elephant and rhinoceros, and such tropical creatures as the hippopotamus, replaced the beasts of the snow land. Horses of different species were sometimes present in incredible numbers. There were species of wild cattle, including the European bison, and the urus or aurochs-

ature conditions. A century ago the hippopotamus was found in the temperate Cape Colony, close to mountain ranges climatically fit for the typical beasts of north-temperate Eurasia. In Arizona at the present day mammals and birds of the Canadian fauna live on the mountain tops around the bases of which flourish animals characteristic of the tropical Mexican plateau; the former having been left stranded on high mountain islands when, with the retreat of the glaciers, the climate of the United States grew warmer and the tide of southern life-forms swept northward over the lowlands. Under such conditions the same river deposits might show a combination of utterly different faunas. Moreover, some modern animals are found from the arctics to the tropics. Th

nt species of horse and elephant succeeded one another. The earlier ones were contemporaries of the hippopotamus and of not only the lion but the sabretooth. When the hairy elephant, the mammoth, was present, the fauna also often included the cave-lion, cave-hyena, cave-bear, wolf, boar, woolly rhinoceros, many species of deer (including the moose and that huge fallow deer, the

dwellers show that the elephant of the cold northlands had impressed their imaginations precisely as the hairless elephant of the hot south now impresses the imaginations of the tribes that dwell under the vertical African sun. The rhinoceros and wild cattle of the pine forests played in their lives the part played in the lives of our contemporaries, the hunti

f our greatest pleasures to have seen. During the ages when the successive races of hunter-savages dwelt in Europe a similar magnificent fauna of huge and strange beasts flourished on all the continents of the globe except in Australia. In Europe it vanished in prehistoric times, when man had long dwelt in the lan

a (they had once flourished in North America but had died out long before man appeared on the globe). Camels were found in Asia, in South America, and especially in North America, which was their centre of abundance and the place where they had developed. Wild oxen were found in all the continents except South America; deer everywhere except in true Africa, zoogeographical Africa, Africa south of the Sahara. The pigs of the Old World were replaced by the entirely different peccaries of the New World. Sheep, goats, and goat-antelopes lived in Eurasia and North America. Most of the groups of big ruminants commonly called "antelopes" are now confined to Africa; but it

e northern hemisphere. During the period when this great North American fauna flourished hunter-savages of archaic type lived amid, and partly on, the great game of Europe. But, as far as we know, men did not come to America u

, deep pits covered with water. In part of the area these pits and pools of tar have existed for scores of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, since far back in the Pleistocene. They then acted as very dangerous and efficient mammal traps and bird traps-and now continue so to act, for the small mammals and the birds of the neighborhood st

bivorous and carnivorous beasts and birds is due to the character of the deposits. The tar round the edges of the pools or pits hardens, becomes covered with dust, and looks like solid earth; and water often stands in the tar pits after rain, while at night the shallow pools of fresh tar look like water. Evidently the big grazing or browsing beasts now and then wandered out on the hard asphalt next the solid ground, and suddenly became mired in the soft tar beyond. Probably the pi

were more apt to work themselves free at the moment when they found they were caught in the tar; and, moreover, a wolf or sabretooth which was weakened by age or by wounds received in encounter with its rivals, or with s

plains of East Africa, where the few trees are thorny, stunted acacias and the low grass is brown and brittle under the drought, the herds of zebra, hartebeest, wildebeest, and gazelle are a perpetual delight and wonder; and elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo abounded on them in the days before the white man came. On the Guaso Nyero of the north, and in the Sotik, the country was even drier at the time of my visit, and the character of the vegetation showed how light the normal rainfall was. The land was open, grassy plain, or was thinly covered with thorn scrub, with here and there acacia groves and narrow belts of thicker timber growth along the watercourses, and in the

d my fellow ranchmen hunted when, in the early eighties of the last century, our branded cattle were first driven to the Little Missouri. They swarmed on the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone when Lewis and Clark found the bison and wapiti so tame that they would hardly move out of the way, while the grizzly bear

ht-had there been human eyes to see it. Nor were they the only representatives of their family. A much more archaic type of elephant, the mastodon, flourished beside its gigantic cousin. The mastodon was a relatively squat creature, standing certainly four feet shorter than the imperial elephant, with comparatively small and slightly curved tusks and a flatter head. Enormous numbers of mastodons ranged over what is now the United States, and the adjacent par

immigrants, which had reached North America by another temporary land bridge, but from another continent, South America. These were the ground-sloths, giant edentates, which reached an extraordinary development in the southern half of our hemisphere, where distant and dimi

. Camels-including llamas-developed in North America. Their evolutionary history certainly stretched through a period of two or three million-perhaps four or five million-years on this continent, reaching back to a little Eocene ancestor no bigger than a jack-rabbit. Yet after livi

a bison, bigger, straighter-horned and less specialized than our modern bison, represented the cattle

ur-toed "dawn horse" of the Eocene, being likewise the size of a jack-rabbit. Through millions of years, while myriads of generations followed one another, the two families developed side by side, increasing in size and seemingly in adaptation to the environment. Each stock branched into many dif

d on this continent, doubtless ancestral to the sabretooth, but so generalized in type that they display close affinities with the true cats, and even on certain points with the primitive dog creatures of the time. Age followed age-Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene. The continents rose and sank and were connected and disconnected. Vast lakes appeared and disappeared. Mountain chains wore down and other mountain chains were thrust upward. Periods of heat, during which rich forests flourished north of the arctic circle, were followed by periods of cold, when the glacial ice-cap crept down half-way across the present temperate zone. Slowly, slowly, while the surface of the world thus changed, and through innumerable reaches of time, the sabretooth cats and true cats developed along many different lines in both the Old World and the New. One form of sabretooth was in Europe with the bestial near-human things who were the immediate predecessors of the first low but entirely human savages. It was in the two Americas, however, that the sabretooth line culminated, immediately before its final extinction, in its largest

this giant wolf had become specialized as a beast of battle, fitted to attack and master the bulky browsers and grazers, but not to overtake those that were smaller and swifter. The massive jaws and teeth could smash heavy bone

r larger than even the huge Alaskan bear of to-day. Doubtless it took toll of the herds; but bears are omnivorous beasts, and not purely predatory in the

the fact that in many cases it is almost impossible to distinguish the lion and tiger apart by the bones alone; and it may be that the exact affinities of these recently extinct species with living forms cannot be definitely determined. But during historic and prehistoric times the lion has been a beast of western Eurasia and of Africa. The tiger, on the contrary, is and has been a beast of eastern Asia, and apparently has been spreading westward and perhaps southward-that it was not as ancient an inhabitant of jungle-covered southern India as the elephant and leopard seems probable from the fact that it is not found in Ceylon, which island in all likelihood preserves most of the southern Indian fauna that existed prior to its separation from the mainland. Moreover, the finest form of tiger exists

gifted with the imaginative power to visualize the past and to feel the keen delight known only to those who care intensely both for thought and for

actical action. But joy, just for joy's sake, has its place too, and need in no way interfere with work; and, of course, this is as true of the joy of the mind as of the joy of the body. As a man steams into the Mediterranean between the African coast and the "purple, painted headlands" of Spain, it is well for him if he can bring before his vision the galleys of the Greek and Carthaginian mercantile adventurers, and of the conquering Romans; the boats of the wolf-hearted Arabs; the long "snakes" of the Norse pirates, Odin's darlings; the stately and gorgeous war craft of Don John, the square-sailed ships of the fighting Dutch admirals, and the lofty three-deckers of Nelson, the greate

ot do their work as well as others, but their gifts count in the joy of living. Enjoyment the same in kind comes to the man who can clothe with flesh the dry bones of bygone ages, and can see before his eyes

hunting savages who now live surrounded by a similar fauna. On the whole, taking into account the number, variety, and size of the great beasts, the fauna which surrounded Pal?olithic man in Europe was inferior to that amid which dwell the black-skinned savages of equatorial Africa. Even Africa, however, although unmatched in its wealth of antelopes, cannot quite parallel

mels, striding noiselessly on their padded feet, passed the clumsy ground-sloths on their way to water. The herds of huge horses and bison drank together in pools where the edges were trodden into mire by innumerable hoofs. All these creatures grew alertly on guard when the shadows length

re were also, instead of wild turkeys, great quantities of wild peacocks-at least they have been identified as peacocks or similar big, pheasant-like birds. If the identification is correct, this is an unexpected discovery and a fresh pro

southward into Africa, Tasmania, Australia, and remote forest tracts of Indo-Malaysia, where, being such backward savages, they never developed anything remotely resembling a civilization. It was probably people kin to some of the later cave-dwellers who furnished the first (and perhaps until the advent of the white man the only important) immigration to America. These imm

rbivorous creatures, we cannot say. It may be we can never do more than guess at them. It is certainly an extraordinary thing that complete destruction should have suddenly fallen on all, literally all, of the species. Camels and horses, after they had dwelt on this continent for millions of years, since almost the dawn of mammalian life, developing from little beasts the size of woodchucks into the largest an

datory animals of their kind were beasts of battle rather than beasts of the chase. They were fitted to overcome by downright fighting strength a big, slow, self-confident quarry, rather than to run down a swift and timid quarry by speed or creep up to a wary and timid quarry by sinuous stealt

and New World monkeys, its most characteristic animals were edentates and very queer ungulates with no resemblance to those of any other continent. Toward the close of the Tertiary land bridges connected the two Americas, and an interchange of faunas followed. The South American fauna was immensely enriched by the incoming of elephants, horses, sabretooth cats, true cats, camels, bears, tapirs, peccaries, deer, and dogs, all of which developed along new and individual lines. A few of these species, llamas

from one another; the huge cats probably resembled some other big modern feline more than they did the lion. Associated with them were many great beasts, whose like does not now exist on earth. The sabretooth was there, as formidable as his brother of the north, and, like this brother, bigger and more specialized than any of his Old World kin, which were probably already extinct. Among the ungulates of native origin was the long-necked, high-standing macrauchenia, shaped something like a huge, humpless camel or giraffe, and with a short proboscis. This animal doubtless browsed among the trees. Another n

ear. In its native haunts it is very conspicuous, both because of its size and its coloration, and as it never attempts to hide it is always easily seen. It is so slow that a man can run it down on foot. It has no teeth, and its long, curved snout gives its small head an almost bird-like look. Its fore paws, armed with long, digging claws, are turned in, and it walks on their sides. It is long-haired and thick-hided, colored black and white, and with a long, bushy tail held aloft; and as it retreats at a wabbly canter, its brush shaking above its back, it looks anything but formidable. Yet it is a gallant fighter, and can inflict severe wounds with its claws, as well as hugging with its powerful fore legs; and if menaced it will itself fearlessly assail man or dog. When chased by hounds, in the open, I have seen one ins

nd years back, when the Indians had already come into the land, the huge and varied fauna of the Pleistocene still lingered at the foot of the Andes. He had found a cave in which savage men had dwelt; and in the cave were the remains of the animals which they had killed, or which had entered the cave at times when its human tenants were absent. Besides the weapons and utensils of the savages, he had found the grass which they had used for beds, and enclosures walled with stones for purposes of which he could not be sure. It will be remembered that in the cave-home of the 'Ndorobo which

orse survived to the day the Spaniards came to the Argentine and was partly ancestral to the modern Argentine horse; but the supposition is untenable, for the horse in question represents a very archaic and peculiar type, with specialized legs and an extraordinary skull, and could not possibly have had anything to do with the production of the wild, or rather feral, horses of the pampas and the Patagonian plains. Of the mylodon Doctor Moreno found not only comparatively fresh bones, with bits of sinew, but dried dung-almost as large as that of an elephant-and some big pieces of skin. The skin was clothed with lo

ow beyond question that the early hunting savages of southernmost South America lived among the representatives of

the last few thousand years he has been the chief factor in the extermination of the great creatures wherever he has established an industrial or agricultural civilization or semicivilization. The big cat he has warred agai

now he is to be found south of the Atlas, or, nearing extinction, east of the Euphrates. Seemingly the horse was tamed long after the more homely beasts, the cattle, swine, goats, and sheep. He was not a beast for peaceful uses; he was the war-horse, whose neck was clothed with thunder, who pawed the earth when he heard the shouting of the captains. At first he was used not for riding, but to draw the war chariots. Rameses and the Hittites decided their great battles by chariot

Nile northward to the Rhone and the Danube, eastward across India and Siberia, and from Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan. They were dominant figures in the life of all the five continents when primitive man had struggled upward from the plane of his ape-like ancestors and had become clearly human. For ages he was too feeble to be as much of a factor in their lives as they were in the lives of one another; and in

of the Nandi kill the great, maned manslayer with their spears. Again and again, as an offering of peace and good-will, I have shot zebras for natives who greedily longed for its flesh. My son a

forms has been associated, the three with which on the whole this association w

TNO

y ago by Lewis and Clark on the upper Missouri. The journals of these two explorers form an American classic, and they have found a worthy editor in Reuben Gold Thwaites; there could not be an edition more satisfactory from every standpoint-including that of good taste. In a