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WHAT KIND OF A MAN? 119
and repeatedly looking death in the face that posterity might possess a picture of the animal life under the equator that is destined presently to become obsolete. The lion, rhinoceros, elephant, giraffe, zebra, hippopotamus, wild buck, ostrich, baboon, camel, gnu were ours for a time to study at close range, revealed to us in their native habitat without the necessity upon our part of spending months in constant peril from heat, snakes, carnivora, fever, and other enemies which war against the white man in African wilds.
As I watched the screen that evening, my memory went back nearly half a century. It brought to my mind the picture of a boy curled up in a library chair and absorbed in the pages of Paul du Chaillu's book "Under the Equator," a book whose revelations of wild life in Africa subjected the author to a period during which he was suspected of being a Baron Munchausen, or, as we would say to-day, a Dr. Cook. There were skeptics who bluntly asserted that the French explorer had evolved the gorilla out of his own inner consciousness.
Eventually, of course, du Chaillu's veracity was established; but, victim as he was of the limitations of his generation, he could not at first furnish to the public convincing proof that his tales of adventure and discovery in the African jungle were founded upon fact. To-day the explorer, arctic or tropical, returns to civilization as to Missouri — prepared to show all scoffers that their incredulity is ridiculous. Defiantly he has turned a crank while sudden death from a polar bear or a jungle elephant is close at hand; and eventually the imminence of the peril, the suspense of a tragic moment, are within the power of the screen to transmit to wide-eyed audiences safely seated twenty thousand miles away from the scene of the thrilling episode !