LONG a dark secret to the untravelled, Africa is now so much before the eyes and ears of the world, we feel perhaps that bounties should be shifted from man-eating lions and placed upon the heads of sensationalist writers who seek to debunk the country of every lingering element of charm. But to those of us who first heard a leopard snarl or the Ashango tomtoms beat in the pages of a Paul Du Chaillu book, Africa will remain the magic land forever. Now appears for the first time a life account of the man who had this ability of bewitching his readers. When energetic Paul submerged himself in the forests of the Gabon, arm-chair expeditions were hardly conceivable. No white man before him had penetrated beyond the coast, for such obstacles as starvation, wild-beasts, disease and cannibals formed a barrier long considered impregnable. It is but mild praise to say that Du Chaillu's three trips of lengthy duration were successful.

After the other aspects of Du Chaillu's discoveries are forgotten and the spell of his personality has lifted, scientist may remember him as the first observer of the gorilla in modern times. In the eighteen fifties people were terrified but fascinated by what he told of the great apes. Unfortunately, some of the fabulous native stories of the gorillas were mis-construed as his own, among them tales of the beasts abduoting native women. This distrust has even lingered in the minds of present-day writers. It is interesting that, as a Harvard zoologist, who has specialized in the subject, Harold J. Coolidge, Jr., vindicates Du Chaillu's account on the basis of his own experiences with the coast species, less timid than those of the interior and which type the early explorer described. Not insignificant was the encouragement Dr. Jeffries Wyman of Harvard gave the Gorilla Hunter in the sixties when the latter was sending him his first specimens.

As a biographer, Michel Vaucaire is more concerned with presenting an attractive outline of a life than with painting the portrait of a man who was endowed with something far greater than a mere wander-lust. He had an all compelling spirit for exploration, a zeal for lifting the veil of a subtle mystery of his time, the secret of Equatorial Africa. His later journeys in the form of the several trips to the far reaches of Scandinavia where he collected material for "The Land of the Midnight Sun" and the journey to "Russia in 1903 where he died should not be under-emphasized. Vaucaire is careful to show what contemporary prestige his subject gained from his writings, his lectures and especially his winning personal qualities. The act of reading "Paul Du Chaillu: Gorilla Hunter" will not be too great a tribute to one who was once internationally admired and beloved, and not without cause.