Sport in Europe

Many English sportsmen have from time to time given us their shooting and fishing experiences in different European countries, and of these some few have assisted in the production of the present work. In no one volume, however, has a series of articles on the sport obtainable in the different countries been collected from the pens of representative native sportsmen; nor indeed, as will be seen, has this been quite achieved in the present work, for in three cases Englishmen have written upon countries not their own. The remaining fourteen articles, however, have, without exception, been contributed by natives of the countries under notice; and in translating several of these articles, and revising the rest, I have preferred, at the sacrifice of uniformity of treatment, to interfere as little as possible with the original. In consequence of this reluctance on my part, the reader will here and there find some little inequality of attention to the same 'details, and passages may in some cases read somewhat literally. Again, it will certainly be found that the various writers by no means subscribe to the same restricted definition of sport or admit the same list of animals that may properly be killed for sport. An animal that is only trapped as vermin in one country may, however, be correctly coveted for the gun in another; and it is above all things necessary, when surveying under such guidance so vast and so variously populated an area as Europe, to take the broadest possible view of sport. In two cases, by the way, the boundaries of the continent have been transcended; for both Prince Demidoff and Mr. Hulme Beaman found it impossible without so doing to present a connected and intelligible account of sport in the Russian and Turkish empires. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.