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to express my own convictions, whatever they might be, as plainly as I could, and if I did not do this from principle it would yet be policy, for in authorship, as in all other things, the saying is true that "truth goes furthest." As I have begun, so I shall go on. I write at my ease, because I have no fear of anybody before my eyes.'

As the work proceeded Elwin came to feel, with the author of 'Zeluco,' that tracing the windings of vice, and delineating the disgusting features of villany, are unpleasant tasks.' After completing the fifth volume he resolved to do no more, and left the edition to be completed by another hand. The remaining five volumes found a competent editor in Mr. Courthope, and this fine edition of Pope will probably satisfy all future students of literature. The sound criticism of the introductions, the varied learning and far-reaching research of the notes, become more and more remarkable the more carefully the work is examined.

The chief work of the concluding years of Elwin's life was the rebuilding of his parish church. He already possessed a wide knowledge of Gothic architecture, and he soon acquired all the details of building and of materials. He acted as his own architect, and in the end produced what is perhaps the most beautiful country parish church which has been erected in Norfolk since the Middle Ages. He also built a schoolhouse, with a comfortable residence for the teachers. He was the friend and adviser of every person in his parish, a comforter in every mental trouble, a generous helper in every physical need, and he was beloved and revered by them all.

For upwards of fifty years he discharged his duties as parish priest of Booton, declining more than one offer of preferment. He performed the services in his church for the last time on Sunday, December 31st, 1899. On the following morning, as he did not come down so soon as was expected, his servant went up to his room and found that he had passed away as he was dressing. He was buried on January 5th, 1900, in the churchyard of Booton, beside his beloved wife, who died in 1898. His parishioners filled the church and followed him to the grave, and many of them afterwards expressed their grief at his loss almost in the very words of Goldsmith :

'And to tell you my mind,

He has not left a wiser or better behind.'

ART. II.-AN AGE OF EXTERMINATION.

1. Narrative of an Expedition to Southern Africa during the years 1836 and 1837. By Captain Cornwallis Harris. Bombay: American Mission Press, 1838.

2. A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa. By F. C. Selous. London: Bentley, 1881.

3. Kloof and Karroo. By H. A. Bryden. London: Longmans,

1889.

4. The Encyclopædia of Sport. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1898.

5. Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. Neumann. London: Rowland Ward, 1898.

By A. H. 6. After Big Game in Central Africa. By E. Foà. London: A. and C. Black, 1899.

7. Sport in Somaliland. By Count Potocki. (English edition.) London: Rowland Ward, 1900.

8. Fifteen Years' Sport and Life in the Hunting Grounds of Western America. By W. A. Baillie-Grohman. London: Horace Cox, 1900.

MAN

AN is a hunting animal. At first he slew for meat and clothing; then he slew for sport or trade; latterly he has taken to slaying, it would seem, for the mere passion of slaughter or trophy-hunting; and, his prolonged exertions in that direction having met with too great a success, a spirit of reaction is now apparent in many quarters. The desire to avert, if only for a space, the doom of the quadrupeds more particularly menaced by the hunter is a creditable one; but it must be confessed that some little vagueness marks the counsels of those who urge reform. A superficial examination of the measures most in favour, and of the difficulties that beset the reformer's path, is sufficient to lay bare the origin of this vagueness. The theatre of extermination is so vast, and the conditions of the problem are so varied, that no single measure or protective principle can adequately remedy the whole mischief. Each continent presents its own aspect of the question. In western Europe, for example, if we except the case, hereinafter noticed, of the Scandinavian elk, the big game will have been found to be doomed by the growth of cities and by the influence of agriculture on the earth's physiognomy. In Africa, the quest of ivory has doomed the elephant, and incidentally also the antelopes slain for the larder of the elephant hunters. The greed for meat and skins, coupled with certain results of railway enterprise, into which it is here unnecessary to enter,

has sealed the fate of the North American bison. In India the sporting zeal of officers on short leave has done for the horned game that which Government rewards are vainly endeavouring to do for tigers and venomous snakes.

There are strong objections, national and moral, to any total suppression of this love of the chase, and it is certainly not among the aims of this paper to suggest such a policy. Sportsmen have filled in many of the blanks in the map of what can scarcely any longer be termed the Dark Continent; and a history of African pioneering that should take no account of the operations of the hunters of big game would be a very defective record. Geographical research, exclusive of those expeditions which aim at unlocking the grim secrets of the great glaciers that envelope the Poles, has been immensely furthered by sport, and the exploration of mountain and desert regions has been largely due to the pursuit of big game. Nor is sport by any means the only agency which has been at work in shaping the fate of the beasts and birds. Many species have perished in that interminable struggle for existence which extinguished the mastodon and the hesperornis. Such may have been the fate of the moa; but a sailor is said, on good authority, to have knocked down the last dodo, and the great auk appears to have perished owing to indiscriminate slaughter in its breedingplaces. Whatever may have been the effect of natural laws on the continuance of species, the destructive activity of man, in respect at any rate of the beasts and birds, has been only too successful. The present paper proposes no more than a cursory glance at the destruction already accomplished, as illustrated in the writings of some famous sportsmen of the century, with some reflections on that which has been done, and more particularly on that which remains to be done, in the direction of putting a stop to further wasteful slaughter.

A distinction must at the outset be drawn between extinction as applied to a specified area, once the habitat of some animal no longer encountered there, and extinction in its sadder significance of total disappearance from the earth. Instances of the former occur in the British bear, boar, and bustard; while of the latter familiar examples may be named in the dodo, the great auk, and the solitaire. The consequences of such indiscriminate hunting may often reach far beyond immediate results. Thus if the Arctic seals, already driven from the floes to the inland ice, were utterly destroyed, the polar bear would go too, and, in his turn, the Esquimaux. In North America, the bison is gone and the elk is threatened. The history of the bison is a mournful illustration of how much the

exterminator can accomplish in a short time. Thirty years ago two or three millions of these noble beasts yet survived on American soil; nowadays, it may safely be questioned whether there are two or three hundred left, and even these are semidomesticated, like the flock kept, and recently sold, by Mr. Jones of Omaha. The fate of the bison was sealed in the seventies and eighties. In one year in the seventies, over four thousand were slaughtered in the Yellowstone Park; and, in the season of 1878-9, two hundred thousand of their hides were shipped down the Missouri.* Against such greed even the prodigality of nature is powerless. The elk, menaced though not exterminated, has retreated from the Adirondack region to the less accessible portions of Montana and Wyoming, and is only there preserved from the fate which overtook the plain-loving bison by the forbidding nature of the hilly country. The bighorn has in like manner withdrawn to the mountainous regions of British Columbia, Wyoming, and Montana. The Rocky Mountain goat antelope-goat' a recent writer prefers to call ithas retreated further than ever above the timber line of the Bitter Root Mountains.

It is the rifle that destroyed the bison: Mr. Roosevelt gives incontrovertible proof of this. The red man's arrow, while supplying his modest wants, was as powerless to exterminate the bison as were the assegais of Kaffirs against the rhinoceros, or the poisoned arrows of Somali Midgáns against the elephant. The most destructive combination, as we shall have occasion to show in another connexion, is the untiring native armed with a modern rifle. So far as concerns mere head of game, without reference to the species, the worst offenders in North America have probably been the fur-hunters; but, generally speaking, the skins in which they deal are those of small carnivora, largely regarded as vermin. Thus, in 1892, the Hudson Bay Company's warehouse i Montreal received 134,814† furs of bear, beaver, ermine, lynx, marten, mink, otter, and other animals. Vast as is the slaughter entailed, it has in these cases some justification, for the animals do irreparable damage to the settler's stock when alive, and serve a distinct purpose in providing warm furs when dead. It is with earth's big game that these remarks are mainly concerned; but mention may be made of the fact that, whereas fifty years ago travellers were charmed with the spectacle of myriads of white egrets fringing the lagoons of Florida, only a stray group or two of these birds can nowadays be seen. The reason for this change, as

* "The Field,' September 19th, 1896, p. 469.

+ The Imperial Institute Year Book for 1894,' p. 293.

exposed recently in the Times,' is that, according to consular returns, the annual slaughter of these beautiful birds, harmless and insectivorous, for the sake of their plumes, must be reckoned at a million and a half of victims. It may be noted, in connexion with another beautiful group of feathered creatures much persecuted in the interests of millinery, that in a single week's sales in London, no fewer than fifty thousand humming-birds have been known to change hands. The curse of the gunner broods over the close of the century in a manner that attracts the execration of a great part of the civilised world.

'A vast gulf,' says Baker, 'separates the true sportsman from the merciless gunner. The former studies nature with keen enjoyment, and shoots his game with judgment and forbearance, upon the principles of fair play, sparing the lives of all females should the animals be harmless; he never seeks the vain glory of a heavy game list. The gunner is the curse of the nineteenth century; his one idea is to use his gun, his love is slaughter, indiscriminate and boundless, to swell the long account which is his boast and pride. Such a man may be expert as a gunner, but he is not a sportsman, and he should be universally condemned.'

This is almost as apt a reflection on some modern bird battues as when Drayson wrote: "I think the amount of slain is no criterion of the amount of sport.' The pity of it all is that the rifle has the power of destroying in a few years a type that has taken fifty ages in the making. Every year the danger increases that the moose and the eland may follow to extinction the wild bison and the true quagga. Such types, each of which may have its useful lesson for us, can never be replaced, when once the gunner has been allowed to do his worst. They may cease to be, before scientific enquiry has reached the stage at which they are essential to its progress.

The modern measure of protecting survivors of the threatened species in vast sanctuaries is of American origin, and the game reserves already existing have received their latest addition in the South Bronx Park, a domain of over one hundred and fifty thousand acres. From North America this plan of fencing off great game areas communicated itself to South Africa, where Mr. Rhodes and the De Beers Company maintain such preserves for all manner of game. Mr. Selous, the well-known lion hunter, tells us of a similar praiseworthy effort on the part of two Dutch farmers in the Orange Free State to preserve an animal threatened with early extinction. These gentlemen, it appears, preserve black wildebeest on their farms, and Mr. Selous regards the extermination of that grotesque antelope as among the first probable results of the carrying of war into that

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