A DAY'S ELEPHANT HUNTING
IN ESSEX.
BY HENRY WALKER, F.G.S.
(A Lecture delivered May 29th, 1880.)
I.
SOME OLD GAME PRESERVES.
Each old elephant grins with vast amaze,
While rousing him from his marble hearse,
As a world so new and so strange he surveys ;
And doubtless he thinks that since his younger days
Things are strikingly changed for the worse.
William Conybeare.
In the rural sports and recreations to which so many
happy Londoners now devote their Saturday afternoons,
what outcroppings of the lurking instincts and pursuits of
savage man might not the eyes of anthropologists detect!
Below the sober-looking, scientific guise of the modern
London naturalist, who starts at two o'clock on Saturdays
from "the smoke and stir of this dim spot," for shining
river, lake, or glooming woodland (armed with divers
wondrous implements and bags of artful make), how much
might, perhaps, be traced of innate and ancestral love
of hunting—of reversion to the untamed instincts and
delights of savage life! As lambs and kids (so Mr. Darwin
tells us) betray their Alpine origin by their fondness for the
smallest hillock on which to leap and frisk, so it seems do
City denizens, released on Saturdays from artificial life,
betray the birthplace of their race by their forms of
B