To-day one may perhaps read in the East African Gazette that Mr. Smith, the railway engineer, favoured by extraordinary luck on a hunting expedition, has seen one solitary bull elephant not far from Lake Nakuro! This is something quite out of the ordinary, and Mr. Smith is to be congratulated. Unfortunately his efforts during many years to have even one young East African elephant sent to London have been without any result. A young animal is no longer to be found. In the same number of this newspaper, under another heading, we read the report that the export of ivory this year by the Uganda Railway has been utterly disappointing; the quantity carried has been terribly small, hardly worth mentioning!

I had a talk lately with a travelling companion who had spent some time with me in the wilderness ten years ago, and who had just revisited those distant lands, availing himself of the railway. Alfred Kaiser, a widely travelled man, recalled to me the life we had lived together, when there was yet hardly a trace of European influence among the people of the interior by Lake Victoria. In memory we saw again the inhabitants of then hardly known Sotikoland receiving us mistrustfully on their frontier, thousands strong. Their glittering spears sparkle in the morning sun; chiefs, ministers, and court ladies of the Wakawiróndo appear in camp in most primitive costume; club-armed warriors regard us with the most open distrust; cowry shells and artificial pearls form their costume and are used as their money; sudden attacks and fighting are quite in the order of the day.

And now, only ten years later, Kaiser has seen the Masai at Lake Nakuro, English-speaking caricatures of civilisation.

A feeling of something like resentment comes upon the traveller who has had to pay toll for his journey with the ceaseless sweat of his brow, when he thinks that now any one can reach Lake Nakuro in a few days from the coast. It is true that the over-anxious globe-trotter is kept in check by only too well justified fears of the treacherous malaria and the sleeping-sickness that has made such terrible progress of late. Otherwise the railway journey from Mombassa to the Victoria Nyanza, and then down the Nile to Cairo, would be a much-travelled route.

I have tried to describe, in brief outline, the rapid, unwelcome change of our time, the result of European civilisation forcing its way in. As I describe things, so they were half a century ago, and even yet ten years ago, when I stayed by the shores of Nakuro, and no railway had yet been made there.

To-day one can no longer find the old spell of the Elelescho there, or anywhere else where the white man has penetrated.

The traveller probably sees only a shrubby plant.

It covers many a ridge, and the lonely plains of the uplands, and sends afar its spicy perfume. The botanists call it Tarchonantus camphoratus, L. They class it among the Compositæ.

But here it can no longer exercise any spell.

That has flown far, far away, into the interior. There, where the white man has not yet come, it still prolongs its existence.

How long, yet will it be before it has entirely departed?

ONE OF THE OLDEST “NATURE DOCUMENTS” FROM THE HAND OF MAN. PREHISTORIC SKETCH OF A MAMMOTH ON A FRAGMENT OF IVORY.
(From L. Reinhardt’s work Der Mensch zur Eiszeit in Europa.) II
From the Cave-dweller’s Sketch to the Flashlight Photograph

The mysterious charm of wild nature, undisturbed, almost untouched, by the hand of man,—the charm inherent in all that I have in mind when I talk of “the spell of the Elelescho”—explains the keen and profound interest with which my pictures of animal life were received at home.

In these days, when even electricity has been harnessed by men, there is a feeling that the knell has been sounded of all that is wild, be it man or beast. And however unpretending and inadequate the little pictures might be that I had won from the wilderness, yet all nature-lovers felt that they had here before them authentic, first-hand records revealing secrets which the eye of man had never before looked upon, or had had but scant opportunity for studying.

These pictures were the first to show really wild animals in full freedom, just as they actually live their life on velt and marsh-land, in bush, forest, air, and water. They showed nature in its unalloyed reality, and therefore a peculiar stamp of truth and beauty must have imprinted itself upon them. They came, too, as a surprise, for in many points the hitherto accepted representations of the animal world and those given by my photographs did not agree.

Mere subject counts for so much in a picture with most people that it takes them a long time to appreciate a work of art the subject of which does not at the first glance appeal to them. This applies peculiarly to my African photographs. It is not a very easy matter for the eye to grasp the movements of the varying forms of animal life in their natural freedom. Often their appearance is so blended with their surroundings that it requires long practice to distinguish the individual characteristics of each, the fleeting graces of their momentary aspects.

I could not, therefore, help feeling a certain apprehension that every one would not at once be able to understand and decipher my pictures in my book, With Flashlight and Rifle. It is necessary when one looks at them to understand, in some degree, how to read between the lines; one must make an effort to grasp their more elusive features; in short, one must devote oneself to the study of them with a certain gusto, a certain intelligence. There was a further difficulty arising from the fact that the illustrations could be reproduced only by a process in which unfortunately much of the finer detail of the originals is lost. The use of the process, however, was necessary for various reasons.

There can be only two ways of securing the best possible result in the execution of pictures of such subjects. The ideal method would be for heaven-sent artists, after years of study, to give us works of this class, and combine in these masterpieces the strictest truth with the finest craftsmanship. But this requires a thorough study of each separate species of animal seen from afar and at close quarters—and how is this possible, seeing that one gets only momentary glimpses? The other method is that of photography, the picture on the negative, which can claim the advantage of documentary accuracy, and at the same time leaves a certain scope for the artistic sense of the operator. So the greatly improved photographic methods of to-day can step in, at least as a substitute and makeshift, in the absence of works of art such as the genius of one man may give us. Considering the extreme difficulty of taking portraits of living animals in their wild, timid state, such pictures can only in a few instances lay claim to technical photographic perfection. But at least so far as my own taste goes, a certain lack of sharp definition in the picture (often deliberately sought for in taking other objects) is not only no disadvantage, but is even desirable. As a confirmation of this idea of mine, I may mention the opinion of an American journalist, who declares that my picture of a herd of wild animals given on page 327 of With Flashlight and Rifle to be the most perfect thing of the kind he has seen, and the most pleasing to him, and compares it to the work of a Corot.

It must be noted that if the animals are drawn so as to stand out separated from the landscape which is a needful accessory of the picture, and brought forward into the foreground in an obviously selected pose, they must appear unnatural to the eye of the expert. Such pictures cannot fail to give an unnatural impression, for in the freedom of the wilderness the animal world never presents itself in this way to the eyes of man. In their full significance as masterpieces of nature, all the various aspects of the animal world are first manifested to us in close connection with their environment. It has been a keen satisfaction to me to find that many world-renowned artists have appreciated warmly the beauty of these photographs, and have given expression to this feeling. I have been told, for instance—what I myself had already noticed—that numbers of the pictures, especially, those showing birds on the wing, bear a great resemblance to certain famous works of Japanese painters12 of animal life, works that seem to dive into the secrets of nature. It has been brought home to me, indeed, both by hundreds of letters and thousands of opinions expressed in conversation, that the pictures have excited almost universal interest, and that my labours have not been in vain.

Fully to enjoy the peculiar beauty of such photographs of living wild animals, the best way is undoubtedly to see the pictures considerably magnified by means of the magic lantern. On account of the special character and strangeness of most of the objects shown, I have the lantern slides lightly tinted. This colouring can be done without in the least altering the picture in its details, and its object is merely to secure greater effectiveness. Approval from all sides, both from artistic circles and from the public, satisfies me as to the correctness of this proceeding. Only in this way do photographic pictures shown by transmitted light produce the full impression of beauty and naturalness; they seem to transport the spectator directly to the far-off wilderness.

There must be some good reason for the widespread interest manifested in these pictures of the life and ways of animals, some of them still so little known, and all of them living in remote solitudes. It seems to me that the cause is deep-seated—that deep down in the heart of the highly-cultured civilised man there are involuntary yearnings after the sensations of wild, healthy, primeval nature. The progress of mankind from the so-called barbaric stage to the highest civilisation has been accomplished in so short a time, in comparison with the whole period of man’s existence, that it is easy to understand how such a longing may survive. In every man there must be something of this craving for light and air and primeval conditions.

“The conflict of man with the animal world,” says Wilhelm Bölsche, “has passed away unsung and uncelebrated. The civilised man of to-day has hardly a recollection of the endless lapse of time during which mankind had to struggle with the beasts of the earth for mastery.” Let us for a few moments turn our gaze backwards to that far past. In epochs that the learned date back by hundreds of thousands of years, we find attempts made by the cave-dwellers to execute artistic representations of nature as they saw it. The artist of prehistoric times set to work with his rude instruments to draw in merest outline on a smooth rock-face, on a tusk taken in the chase, or on some such material, the things that had particularly attracted his thoughts or stimulated his efforts. Specimens of these primitive works of art have been handed down to us. In the first place there are pictures of animals, scratched upon ivory, and notwithstanding all their crudeness, sketched with sufficient ability to enable us to-day to recognise with certainty the objects which the artist tried to depict. Such sketches scratched on ivory, showing various kinds of animals (some of them now extinct) and forming the oldest documents of the animal-sketcher’s art, have been found in the caves of the south-west of France, in the old dwelling-places of the so-called “Madeleine” hunters of La Madeleine and Laugerie Basse. The museum at Zurich also possesses similar primitive documents from the Kesslerloch cave, near Thaingen, in the canton of Schaffhausen.

It is indeed not surprising that the cave-dweller of those days took his models from the ranks of the animal creation. All his thoughts and efforts were directed to the chase; he had no resources but in this pursuit, and he had to carry on, day and night perhaps, a fierce struggle for existence with wild beasts. One can thus follow the development of the human race through the course of time from the primitive sketches of beasts down to our own days, in which it has been reserved for the hand of man to execute masterpieces inspired by genius, and in which man makes the sun to serve him in depicting and preserving representations of all that lives and moves, creeps and flies. By means of the sketches of animals laboriously scratched on pieces of ivory by the Cave men of Southern Europe, we make the acquaintance of the long-haired prototypes of the living elephants of to-day. These animals were the most coveted big game in Europe. Clearly recognisable sketches of reindeer tell us that a climate like that of the northern steppes prevailed at the time; others of horses show that the wild horse was then to be found in Europe; those of the aurochs prove the existence of that animal. There is a remarkably close resemblance between the style of all these drawings and that of the rude sketches made by the Esquimaux of our own day. Some such Esquimaux sketches of animals on walrus tusks, at the most a hundred years old, are to be found in the Berlin Ethnographical Museum. Interesting, too, are the sketches of giraffes from the hands of ancient Egyptian artists. They show us that the artist of those days in drawing animals allowed a loose rein to his fancy and imagination. Thousands of years must separate these representations of animals from the sketches of Asiatic wild life which Sven Hedin discovered at Togri-sai-Tale near Lôb-nor. They are scratched on bright green slate, and depict yaks, wild asses and tigers, and the hunting of them with bow and arrow. They appear to be of the same kind as the animal-sketches made by the South African Bushmen, discovered by Fritsch in the year 1863. These cave pictures show us various members of the fauna of Cape Colony, which has already been to so great an extent exterminated. During the period of the Middle Ages a more perfect style of representing animals was gradually evolved, but even about the year 1720 we find representations that are inaccurate to an incredible extent, and, indeed, so recently as the early part of last century, one sees in the travels of the French naturalist Le Vaillant, in the picture of a female hippopotamus, a proof that the development of animal-drawing had as yet made little progress.

But what a difference in drawing and technique has come about in less than a hundred years! One need only compare the pictures of those times with the works of our own days, to be convinced that, besides artistic execution, there is now an increasingly exacting demand for the precise truth. Indeed, one of the first points to be insisted on is that photographic pictures shall not be altered, worked up—in word, in any way “retouched.” Only on this condition can they really claim to be—that which in a special sense they ought to be—true to nature, absolutely trustworthy “nature-documents.” This distinguishes the photograph from works of art executed by the hand of man, which must conform to each individual conception of the artist.

It is a hard saying that the modern cultured man is becoming, continually more and more estranged from nature. But in this matter let us take the standpoint of the optimist, who says to himself that there must be a reaction—a conscious, deliberate return, which indeed will represent the result of the highest stage of culture. There is an increasing perception of the existence in our home landscape of an ideal worth, that we have not yet been able sufficiently to estimate. To-day already there is a movement on all sides, and the demand is heard, ever stronger and clearer, for the protection of the beauties of nature. We must protect Nature in the widest sense of the word. And even if, in the stern progress of evolving civilisation, much that remains in the treasury of primitive nature must be destroyed, we shall be able long to preserve and rejoice in much else.

And here come into play the healthy desire of man in his primitive state, the cry for light and air, and all the beauty of nature. It is hardly a hundred years since we in Europe learned to value the landscape beauties of unspoilt nature. English writers of travels a century ago still spoke of Switzerland with aversion; it was for them a horrible, dismal mountain country. And it is easy to understand how man in his hard struggle for the necessaries of life regarded, and was forced to regard, nature around him as on the whole unfriendly and menacing. But since those times there has been a change for the better, even though it cannot be denied that many men require very specially adjusted spectacles to enable them to enjoy this or that beauty of the nature around them! Thus the landowner feels a pleasing satisfaction at the sight of his cornfields. And yet these cornfields are hardly anything else but an artificially formed bit of bare velt, on which at certain times a short-lived vegetation grows up, whilst at other times the naked soil presents itself to the eye—uninviting, stripped of all adornment, arid and empty. Thus, too, the man who loves wine feels that well-cultivated vineyards are a beautiful sight; but it may be doubted whether he would do so if, say, only cotton-pods grew on the vines! In ancient times, as Humboldt shows, with the Greeks and Romans, as a rule, only country that was “comfortable to live in” was called beautiful, not what was wild and romantic. Yet Propertius13 and many others praise the beauty of nature left to itself, in contrast with that which is embellished by art. Then we have a long way to travel through the Middle Ages, when the Alps are described to us as “dismal” and “horrible,” till we come to the nature-studies of Rousseau, Kant, and Goethe. At first there were very few to sympathise with them. Their view gradually prevailed, in spite of many backward eddies. Thus Hegel had only one impression of the Swiss Alps, that of a performance tiresome on account of its length—a judgment not far removed from that of the Savoyard peasant who declared that people who took any interest in snow-covered mountains must be insane.

On the other hand, we find in Eastern Asia, and especially among the Japanese, from the earliest times, the most ardent love for nature, and there even the poorest knows how to adorn his home with flowers, and to turn the beauty of the landscape to similar account.

A great part of the interest felt in natural beauty is perhaps to be traced to extraneous considerations. On the other hand, here in Germany we see most of our people full of feeling for our glorious forests and for our German scenery in general. We have to face the prospect, however, of a silenced countryside—a countryside without song or music.14 That is a matter for anxiety. Insects, birds, quadrupeds, life and movement should be a part of the landscape. This idea should continue to attract more and more adherents. German thought and feeling are altogether in unison on this subject, and it is to be hoped that the cry for the protection of the beauties of nature, for the preservation of the plant and animal worlds, and all that is picturesque in our native landscape, may continue to find expression. The League for the Preservation of the Homeland in Germany gains daily new supporters.

Men like Professor Conwentz and many others have been working for years in this direction, and carrying on a most successful propaganda. This action for the preservation of the Homeland, taken in the highest and broadest sense of the word, must tend to evoke and foster the love of nature and its beauties in ever wider circles.

In other countries, too, steady progress is being made towards the same goal, and the importance of these considerations has long been recognised. In England and in America a way has recently been found to give practical effect to the idea of the protection of the beauties of nature by measures well calculated for this end. In this connection, too, a refined æsthetic culture is gaining ground. I do not at all close my eyes to the difficulty of regulating the conditions bearing on this matter. But in this connection we must not shrink from decisive measures. Those who come after us will be the first to prize and esteem these measures at their full value.

What I have here described as something to be desired and worth striving for at home must also hold good for the whole world—the preservation of all that is characteristic, all that belongs to primitive nature, wherever it is to be found.

The beauties of nature are most abundant, and in our time they are all—all—threatened with destruction and in need of protection. Where we can save and preserve any of them, our hands should not remain idle.

But where this is not possible, let us secure “nature-documents,” paintings, representations of all kinds as true to life as may be.

In this way we shall, at least, save for future ages memorials of enduring worth, for which our children’s children will give us thanks.

A RHINOCEROS MOVING SLOWLY THROUGH THE GRASS OF THE VELT—TAKEN WITH THE TELEPHOTO-LENS AT A DISTANCE OF 120 METRES, AND WHERE THERE WAS NO COVER. THE ANIMAL LOOKED REMARKABLY LIKE AN ANT-HILL. ON ITS BACK ONE SEES A BIRD—(BUPHAGUS ERYTHRORHYNCUS, Stanl.)—HUNTING FOR TICKS. III
New Light on the Tragedy of Civilisation

Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States of America, says in his lately published work, Out-door Pastimes of an American Hunter: “The most striking and melancholy feature in connection with American big game is the rapidity with which it has vanished.”

He makes a critical investigation of this disturbing fact, and he most strongly advocates restrictive laws and the establishment of reservations for wild animals. He puts himself at the head of every effort directed towards the protection, as far as may be, of the animal world and of wild nature, and shows by word and deed how even in a brief period remarkable results can be obtained in this direction. At the same time, on every page of his striking work, the President shows that he is in favour of the practice of the chase within proper limits, and thus he by no means takes the side of extreme partisans in this matter. His efforts are of the greatest service to the cause, and will no doubt have extremely valuable results in the United States, where, owing to its peculiar circumstances, the natural treasures of the country were, till very lately, recklessly wasted.

The establishment of the Yellowstone National Park was largely the President’s work. In this vast territory no shot may be fired. It forms an inviolable national sanctuary, within whose boundaries life of all kinds is safe. Several similar reservations are already established, or their establishment is projected. Strict protective laws have been some of them brought into operation throughout the States, and some of them gradually extended to various districts according to their circumstances. Whole tracts (as, for instance, Alaska) have been closed for years by law against the hunter. In short, a period of thoughtless ravage has been followed by an era of self-control with a swiftness that no one would ever have expected under the conditions prevailing in America.

The facts I have noted give one something to think about. When in such vast regions of the world measures of this kind are found to be necessary, there must have been strong grounds for them. And, in fact, primitive nature and all its glories were in as serious peril in the United States as in many other parts of the world. The cutting down of enormous stretches of forest, and the destruction of the stately representatives of the animal world, went on at giant speed in the United States. The almost complete extinction of the splendid American bison, that once roamed in millions over the prairies of the United States, is one of the most startling facts illustrating the destruction of wild animals through the introduction of civilisation. This fact had no slight influence in procuring the enactment of severe measures.

In a land like the United States such measures are possible, advantageous, and practicable. In other countries, too, which are in a settled condition, similar regulations have everywhere come into force of late years. Thus, for instance, the remnants of the fauna of Australia are now protected by stringent laws. But quite different, and much more difficult, are the conditions of the problem with regard to Africa. There, more than anywhere else, the time has come for protective regulations. But how can these measures be enforced, however well they may be thought out? We must keep before our eyes the terrible example of the disappearance of the animal world of South Africa, as the result of the extremely rapid spread of civilised life. We can now, with the help of statements made by trustworthy writers, survey the various phases of this utter destruction of animal life during the last century, and so form an idea of what awaits other parts of the Dark Continent.

Powerful voices have been raised of late in favour of the preservation of African wild life, and this especially in England. In this respect, Mr. Edward North Buxton is most prominent in pressing for thorough measures of protection for the African fauna, throughout the wide possessions or spheres of interest of the British Empire. In England, too, many strong pleas have been made in support of the view that even relatively speaking noxious animals should not be deprived by man of the right to a certain amount of protection. Thus Sir H. H. Johnston, the former Governor of the Uganda Province in Central Africa, says in his preface to the English edition of my book With Flashlight and Rifle, that in his opinion the weasel, the owl, and the primitive British badger of the existing fauna ought not to be entirely sacrificed to the pheasant—a beautiful enough bird, but, after all, one that must always remain an “interloper”; that the egret, the bird of paradise, the chinchilla, the sea-otter,15 and such-like creatures are “æsthetically as important,” and have the same right to existence, as a woman beautifully dressed in the spoils of these animals. Good pioneer work in this direction must result from the noble-hearted resolve of the Queen of England to put herself at the head of the “Anti-Osprey Movement,” organised to save the royal heron from threatened extinction.

There can be no doubt that the complete extermination of any species of animal must excite in the mind of a reflecting man a sense of injustice and wrong; and that this complete destruction of certain species can only be to the interest of all men in general when such animals, of whatever kind they may be, are entirely noxious and quite useless. No epoch in the world’s history can be set in comparison with ours in so far as it has been the witness, in the course of a few decades, of almost daily progress and improvement in connection with industry, culture, and the whole field of human knowledge. And, moreover, no epoch has been so penetrated with the great thoughts of progressive humanity. The continual employment—in ways that are ever more adroit, ever more complex—of all the resources offered by nature to man, seems at the same time to blind him to certain grave misdeeds that he is actually perpetrating every day. These great crimes against the harmony and order with which nature surrounds us—crimes that it is not easy to make any amends for—are the disfigurement and poisoning of watercourses, the pollution of the air, the laying waste of a portion of the plant world (namely, the forests), and the extinction of some of the animals that live with us.

We do not shrink from the most reckless exploitation of those forests that have come down to us from the primeval past—the vast stores of coal buried deep in the bosom of the earth. The expert can now calculate with certainty that in a few hundred, at the very farthest in a thousand, years these stores will be exhausted. When it comes to this, the triumphant progress of industrial science will no doubt give us some substitute, perhaps even something better; but no technical knowledge, no science, can ever give us back anew those highly developed organisms of the plant and animal world which man to-day is recklessly sweeping out of the list of living things. They cannot restore to us the green woods and their animal life. We preserve with punctilious precision every vestige of the art of the past. The older the documents of earlier historic times are, the more eagerly they are coveted, the more highly they are valued. Our collectors gladly pay the largest sums for an old papyrus, an old picture, an object of decorative art, or a marble statue. And, as has been rightly remarked, what warrant have we that some new Phidias, some new Michael Angelo, some new Praxiteles will not arise, and give us something of as high value as these, or even much more perfect? Unreservedly to deny this would be the same thing as to give the lie to the progress of the human race.

But the same man who, in this respect, acts so reverently, so conservatively, looks on with folded arms while treasures are destroyed that ought to be guarded with special affection and care, in these times when the great value of all natural science is so fully recognised.16

We organise, at an extremely high cost, expeditions to survey and explore far-off regions. We sink into the greatest depths of the sea our cunningly devised trawl-nets, and study with ceaseless diligence the smallest organisms that they bring up into the light of day. We consider the course of the stars, and calculate with precision their remote orbits. We daily discover new secrets, and have almost ceased to feel surprised at each day bringing us something new, something yet unheard of. Much that is thus done to secure the treasures of the past might equally well be done in coming years. But much that we neglect to do can never be made good, for we are permitting the slaughter, up to the point of extinction, of the most remarkable, the most interesting, and the least known forms among the most highly organised of the creatures that dwell with us on our earth!

An example that appeals to us with terrible force is that of South Africa (taking the country in its widest limits), a region now so largely peopled by Europeans. There has been an almost complete disappearance of the larger animals that once lived in their millions on its wide plains. If one studies the trustworthy narratives of the earlier explorers, one reads that, hardly a century ago, it was not a rare sight to see in one day a hundred, or even a hundred and fifty rhinoceroses, hundreds of elephants that showed little fear of man, and countless antelopes; and one asks oneself, How can it be possible that all this abundance of life has vanished in so short a time? A specimen of the “white” rhinoceros, which in those times was still living in large numbers, is in our day worth a small fortune; it is to be found in no museum in Germany, and is simply almost impossible to obtain. This former abundance is now known only to few, and these only specialists engaged in studies of this kind. But to them it is also plain and terribly certain that, where the like conditions come into being, the same process that was at work in South Africa will produce the same results.

There can be no doubt about it. In a hundred years from now wide regions of what once was Darkest Africa will have been more or less civilised, and all that delightful animal world, which to-day still lives its life there, will have succumbed to the might of civilised man. That will be the time when the fortunate possessors of horns and hides of extinct African antelopes, and the owners of elephant tusks, skulls, and specimens of all kinds will be selling all this for its weight in gold. And no one will be able to understand how it was that in our day so little thought was given to preserving as far as possible all this valuable material in abundant quantities at least for the sake of science, instead of sacrificing it wholesale to the interests of trade, and to the recklessness of the new settlers in those lands. For these men, who have to struggle hard with the new conditions of life and its necessities, can scarcely act otherwise than heedlessly and short-sightedly. They will always take possession of a district before settled conditions are introduced, and before the Government is in a position to enforce the observance of its regulations, however well-intentioned these may be. So it will come to pass that it will suddenly be found no longer possible to provide European collections with even a pair of specimens of the mighty elephant, or to procure other large animals for exhibition in these establishments. And this will be the case not only with regard to the larger species, but the same thing will happen to all others.

The Queen of England has lately expressed the wish that no lady shall come into her presence wearing osprey plumes in her hat. This act of hers should be most heartily welcomed, for the bird world is being destroyed in a way of which only a few experts have any idea. If our ladies only knew that whole species of birds have become extinct, thanks to the fashion of wearing hats trimmed with birds’ feathers, doubtless they would no longer pay allegiance to this destructive fashion. The massacre of birds is carried on in some such way as this. The leading firms agree to make this or that bird fashionable. It is thus that the death-sentence of many rare species of birds is pronounced. The traders scattered all over the world give the hunters who engage in this kind of business directions, for instance, to bring in osprey feathers. And how are they obtained? The royal heron, a timid and beautiful bird, is not easy to stalk. But the businesslike hunter knows what to do. He simply kills the herons in thousands and thousands at their nesting-places. Love for its offspring brings the beautiful creature within range of the gun-barrel of the lurking hunter, who kills thousands of the birds in cold blood when they are gathered together in the breeding season. Countless thousands must be killed, countless thousands more of young helpless nestlings, bereft of the parent birds, must starve to death before enough of these little plumes has been collected to make a load heavy enough to be put on the bearers’ shoulders. And now the dealers of the whole civilised world lay in a stock, so that full provision may be made for a form of fashion-mania that may probably last only a few months. Even in the farthest swamps of America, in the lands beyond the Caspian, and wherever the royal heron breeds, one can follow the bird hunter, and see him at his horrible and murderous work. The end is everlasting silence. A rare species is soon utterly destroyed. In the last century alone about two dozen species of birds became extinct. And in these days nearly a dozen more species of birds are threatened with extinction! According to the Reports of the Smithsonian Institute this is notably the case in America with regard to quite as many species. The wonderful birds of paradise are going; the latest “trimming” for the hats of American ladies, these dwellers in remote islands of the Southern Seas are to be threatened in a more serious degree, and probably to a great extent exterminated. Everywhere we have the same lamentable facts! It is certainly high time to interfere effectively. I myself think that the best results would follow from appeal to all noble-minded women.

In Africa I have already observed an example of the disappearance of one species of bird17—every European takes a lot of trouble to get possession of some of the much-prized marabou feathers. Now, as long ago as the year 1900, at London, as a member of the International Conference for the Protection of Wild Animals, I did my best to obtain, at least on paper, some measure of protection for the marabou. This bird had not only quite won my heart by its extraordinary sagacity, but for the same reason it was a general favourite even in the times of classical antiquity. My efforts were in vain. And this will mean nothing more or less than the extermination of a large and handsome bird, which is comparatively easy to hunt down, and the rate of increase of which is exceptionally small.

From all these points of view the support of the “League for the Protection of Bird Life in Germany” is to be warmly recommended. In England these reasons have brought about the formation of the “Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire,” which devotes itself to the protection of animal life in general throughout the world-wide British dominions.

Let us now follow a little more closely, under the guidance of English writers, the process of the extermination of the South African animal world. This lamentable work was completed very rapidly in the course of only something like a hundred years. From numerous English authorities, as well as from the publications of the Society already named, I have been able to ascertain that the last “blaauwbok” was killed by the Boers in Cape Colony about the year 1800. From extant sketches of this wild animal, it appears that it was a smaller species of the splendid horse-antelopes still to be found in other parts of Africa. During the following seventy-five years the extermination of several other kinds of animals was systematically carried out; and exactly eighty years later the last quagga, a kind of zebra (Equus quagga) was killed by the Boers. In England there is only one single specimen preserved, and that in a very poor condition. It is to be found in the British Museum. A further sacrifice to the advancing Europeans was the giant, wide-mouthed, “white” rhinoceros (Rhinoceros simus, Burch.), a mighty creature, that formerly ranged in thousands over the grassy plains of South Africa. The length of a horn taken from one of them is given as 6 ft. 9 in., English measurement! Even as late as the year 1884, a single trader was able to pile up huge masses, small hills, of these rhinoceros horns by equipping some four hundred tribesmen of the Matabele race with guns and ammunition and sending them out rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few specimens of this animal for the museums, and they are almost worth their weight in gold. Information lately obtained seems to indicate that a very small number of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five in all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible swamps in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on account of its deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. However, the Government of Natal has, I am pleased to say, made the killing any animal of this species, without legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of £300.

An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William Cornwallis Harris, is an authoritative witness as to the extermination of wild animals in South Africa in 1836, though it must have been going on for a long time before that without any written record. The Boers must have slaughtered hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that date we have no first-hand written evidence on the subject.18 Their proceedings were precisely of the same character as the events that have occurred in our own day in connection with the destruction of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and other animals throughout Africa. This destruction goes on silently, and only a few men who have a special knowledge of the circumstances bring some information about it to the world at large. The rest keep silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing.

The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, C. J. Anderson and their contemporaries give some idea of what enormous multitudes of wild creatures then wandered over the plains of South Africa. We are inclined to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier epochs. The process of animal-destruction by the hand of man has been going on from immemorial times. For thousands of years man has been continually pressing the animal world back more and more, and it has had to give way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going on so slowly and so imperceptibly that it is only by the scanty remnants left from earlier times that we can form some estimate of the wealth that has disappeared. These are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off islands of the world’s seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all the uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of this. Not only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but also from some of his contemporaries, we have descriptions of the former abundance of wild life in the Cape districts of South Africa. At that time the country was, in the literal sense of the word, covered with countless herds of Cape buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras, quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse-antelopes, oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, springbocks, and ostriches. Herds of hundreds of elephants were to be seen. Every marsh, every river-bed, was literally overcrowded with hippopotami. All other kinds of animals that are now so scarce, such as the large and handsome kudu, and all the different kinds of small wild animals, were to be met with in vast numbers. Although since the year 1652 South Africa had been to a continually increasing extent occupied by the Boers, all these wonderful things had managed to survive in rich profusion up to the moment when, about a hundred years ago, the great war of extermination began. Various causes contributed to bring this about: the increasing numbers of the settlers, their continual penetration farther and farther into the interior, and, above all things, the improvement of firearms.

The natives, although very numerous in South Africa, had, as happens everywhere, left the animal life of the country in its abundance to the Europeans, who were overrunning the land in increasing numbers. It was reserved for these to bring the war of extermination to an end in a short time. Truly a melancholy spectacle!

Wilhelm Bölsche describes all this in fitting words:19 “In Africa,” he says, “a wonderful drama is to-day unfolding itself before our eyes. It is the downfall of the whole of a mighty animal world. What is being destroyed is the main remnant of the great mammalian development of the Tertiary period. Once it spread in the same fulness over Europe, Asia, and North America. Now in its last refuge this most wonderful wave of life is rapidly ebbing away. Everything contributes to this result—human progress, human folly, and even disease among the animals themselves.”