1913. Naiu7c Rcsavcs. Ill 
NATURE RESERVES. 
EORMATION OF A NEW SOCIETY. 
[Reprinted, by permission, from The Times of Wednesday, 
December 18, 1912.] 
In his recent address to the Zoological Section of the 
British Association at Dundee, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell made 
a strong appeal for the organi.^ed preservation of the 
world's fauna. " It is only by the dehberate and conscious 
interference of man," he said, " that the evil wrought by 
man has been arrested " ; and, again, " Each generation 
is the guardian of the existing resources of the world ; it has 
come into a great inheritance, but only as a trustee " — a 
trustee, that is to say, for generations that are to be. That 
the larger wild creatures are steadily disappearing from 
the face of the earth with the advance of civiHzation needs 
httle demonstration. But coincidently with the wholesale 
extermination of mammals there is in progress a no less 
disastrous process of destruction among the lesser creatures 
— birds, fishes, reptiles, insects, and plants — also of geo- 
logical remains, and in almost every case this is the result 
of " the deliberate and conscious interference of man." 
To arrest this destructive tendency serious consideration 
is being given to the subject in many countries. There 
exist in the United States " reserves " for the vanishing 
human races ; in Norway, Sweden, and North Russia, 
the Lapps are efficiently protected ; in Africa and New 
Zealand, as elsew^here in the British Dominions beyond 
the seas, large tracts of land have been fenced off, and laws 
enacted to prevent the traffic of alcohol and other goods 
harmful to the primitive races. 
Elsewhere the duty of maintaining particular phases 
of human life and of preserving natural objects is recognized 
and performed by the community as a whole, acting through 
the State ; but in the United Kingdom it has been left to 
private enterprise and private munificence to establish 
and finance such refuges and nature reserves as we actually 
possess. Something has been attempted, it is true, to 
check the wanton destruction of animal life, by various Acts 
of Parhament, the arrane:ement of " close " seasons, sane- 
