400 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XIX. 



rendering remote tracts of country accessible, have led to the diminu- 

 tion of game. Perhaps worst of all — native poachers have been able 

 to obtain better weapons and to work greater destruction. The 

 perfection of fire-arms has also had its influence in other directions. 

 The hunter of the days of the Old Forest Ranger had to approach 

 close to his game before his muzzle-loader could be effective ; the 

 pursuit of wary animals called for the exercise of more skill and 

 knowledge of woodcraft than in these days of the death-dealing 

 long-ranging magazine rifle. There is still, however, an abundance 

 of game in India for those who have the leisure and the enterprise to 

 look for it. 



In the plains of India one does not now-a-days find the herds of 

 two and three hundred antelope, which I recollect seeing in the 

 Berar Valley twenty years ago. These beautiful animals are still 

 numerous ; but their numbers are diminished. Jerdou mentions 

 seeing herds of a thousand near Jalna. This would have been sixty 

 years ago. In the same neighbourhood during the past ten years 

 I have never seen large herds. Never shall I forget a scene in a forest 

 glade on the Pein Gunga, witnessed fourteen years back. I followed 

 on the tracks of a tiger up the bed of a dry water-course having a 

 pool here and there where the great beast and other animals had 

 stopped to drink. After some miles the water-course entered an 

 open space, where a small forest bungalow stood amid a grove of 

 trees. The sun had not long risen, and the umbrageous foliage of 

 the trees, and the slender fronds of the bamboos cast long shadows 

 across the glade. Here stood three or four herds of spotted deer, 

 some browsing on the grass, some standing on their hindlegs to pluck 

 the young shoots from the bamboos ; a herd of nilgai was on the 

 bank of the water-course ; a pair of four-horned antelope were feed- 

 ing beneath a banyan tree ; monkeys, lungoors with grey fringed 

 black faces, were clinging to the trees ; peafowl in numbers were not 

 far from a pool in the nullah ; two wild dogs, which should surely 

 have caused the disappearance of all this game, stood unconcernedly 

 in the middle of the space ; there were before me tracks of a tiger 

 and a panther, and a bear climbing in search of honey had scored 

 deep marks with his claws on the bole of an adjacent tree ; farther on 

 up the hill-side, a sambar belled loudly, but was not in sight ; perhaps 

 the tiger, which was not far ahead of me, had passed that way. For 



