Abstract
WE do not understand with what object this book has been published. Of sketches of sport there are few, and none that can compare in interest with the many exciting records of South African adventure in earlier books with which we are familiar. The author's ideas on all subjects connected with natural history are of the vaguest, as where he says, “The Struthionidae may comprise, for what I know, other species besides those of the ostrich; a geologist would give the reader information on the possibility of these birds existing in some analogous form centuries before the present formation of the globe!” Of sketches of life there are some, but with not much greater claim to novelty. That Mr. Hamilton succeeded in so far divesting himself of European prejudices as to submit to be carried to his bath by twenty buxom Kaffir girls, and after having been ducked by them in the water (an operation which he found “rather agreeable than otherwise”), to be painted over with red earth, may be interesting to himself and his friends, but hardly to the general public. What becomes of the old crinolines appears from the fact that the ordinary costume of a Kaffir schoolgirl is a necklace and an outrageously large skeleton crinoline without any covering over it. The woodcuts are on a par with the letter-press, and would be a hideous disfigurement to any work of higher literary pretensions.
Sketches of Life and Sport in South-Eastern Africa.
By Charles Hamilton. (London: Chapman and Hall. 1870.)
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Sketches of Life and Sport in South-Eastern Africa . Nature 1, 651 (1870). https://doi.org/10.1038/001651c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001651c0