Notes on Sport and Travel

Abstract

THIS is a book, we venture to think, that most readers will lay down with deep regret—regret that a very talented writer, an acute observer, and an ardent sportsman (in the best sense of the word) should have bequeathed so little of his experiences to the world. For George Kingsley, a member of a clever family (or, as his biographer will have it, a member of a clever generation of an ancient family), was evidently a man far above the ordinary intellectual level, and enjoyed unrivalled opportunities of adding to our store of knowledge by travel in distant lands at a time when they were still, to a great extent, populated by their native denizens and unspoiled by the march of civilisation. Unfortunately, however, he seems to have been devoid of those regular and methodical habits of work by which alone the results of a life of exploration and travel can be properly recorded, and we have consequently to be content with mere scraps and fragments of a vast store of information. Notes on Sport and Travel. By George Henry Kingsley. With a memoir by his daughter, Mary H. Kingsley. Pp. viii + 544. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1900.)