Harris (W. Cornwallis) PORTRAITS OF THE GAME AND WILD ANIMALS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA Facsimile

Facsimile Reprint. 175 pages, colour frontispiece, colour vignette on title page, 30 colour plates, chapter endpieces, grey cloth gilt, a very good copy in the dust jacket.

Editor's note.'Captain (later Sir) William Cornwallis Harris, one of the more notable of the early Victorian travellers, recollected that he had been addicted to the sport of shooting "from boyhood upwards...my first essay in practical gunnery was made at the early age of six". He was to sustain this passion - in India, and in the still largely unexplored interior of the southern African subcontinent - throughout his comparatively short life. He died in 1848 at the age of 41. Harris, was, however, more than just another adventurous English "sportsman".

Hunt he did, and on a grand scale, but he also wrote evocatively of his explorations, and sketched, with considerable skill and a fine eye for detail, the animals of the then teeming plains north of the Orange and Vaal rivers, committing to paper a wealth of visual and textual information that represented a truly worthwhile addition to the body of scientific knowledge of his era. One of the splendid results of this deep interest in natural history was 'Portraits of the Game and Wild Animals of Southern Africa', first published in 1840 and here reprinted in facsimile.'