428 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



mals. Evidently the values destroyed in the unreasoning hunt must 

 already be several times as great as the market price of the product 

 secured, to say nothing of the future. It is apparent enough that even 

 if we deny to animals the right to live that Professor Nathorst has so 

 justly and so eloquently maintained they have, the reduction of our 

 problem to the sordid standard demands immediate action. Certainly 

 no one need be reminded that it has taken nature millions of years to 

 evolve the whales, and that it is unlikely that the feat can be again 

 duplicated on this planet. 



The great destruction of the whales is, as we see, then, mainly 

 modern ; the first six or seven hundred years of hunting previous to the 

 use of swift launches were not so noticeably destructive. Perhaps the 

 manner in which large animal species living under strenuous condi- 

 tions and necessarily breeding slowly are so swiftly destroyed in modern 

 times can be understood better in the case of a land form like the 

 musk ox, to which I may briefly advert. Half sheep, half ox, this 

 curiously interesting animal, yielding in quantity a strong under wool 

 with a texture as fine as silk, is confined solely to the treeless arctic 

 wastes of North America and the islands to the north ; its habitat orig- 

 inally extended from Hudson Bay westerly to the Mackenzie River, 

 and all through Baffin Land, and Ellesmere Land to northernmost 

 Greenland. Though the musk ox, despite this wide range, is now 

 becoming exceedingly scarce. Cut off by the white hunter everywhere 

 to the south, the Eskimo of the far north, always hard on the musk ox, 

 have at last obtained guns and are now killing the northern remnants of 

 the original herd. Thus is this hapless denizen of the most inhos- 

 pitable regions of the earth being ground between the upper and nether 

 millstone. 



As such a process must have a speedy end, it is greatly to be hoped 

 that the musk ox can be introduced into Alaska, and that the Canadian 

 and United States governments may soon take this subject up con- 

 jointly. It is most unfortunate that the recent Swedish attempt to 

 introduce musk oxen into Jamtland, southern Lapland, has failed owing 

 to local parasitic enemies. 



Destruction of Our Sea Turtles 



Taking up another group of great sea animals; no chapter in the 

 story of destruction is quite so harrowing as that of the sea turtles of 

 the southern coasts and islands of the United States — the more so 

 because it is not only the original supply that has been cut off, but 

 because there is not the least doubt but that the turtles can with slight 

 expense be increased vastly beyond any numbers ever observed in purely 

 natural environments. 



The problem of conserving and increasing the plant-eating green 

 turtle and the animal-eating hawksbill, which yields the tortoise shell 



