330 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



murderously persecuted by man it increases 

 with extraordinary rapidity. 



This is primarily due to the character of its 

 food. The forest trees themselves furnish 

 what it eats. This means that its food supply 

 is practically limitless. It has very few food 

 rivals. The trunks of full-grown trees offer 

 what is edible to a most narrowly limited num- 

 ber of vertebrates, and therefore — a fact 

 often lost sight of — until man appears on the 

 scene forests do not support anything like the 

 same number and variety of large beasts as 

 open, grassy plains. There are tree-browsing 

 creatures, but these can only get at the young 

 growth; the great majority of beasts prefer 

 prairies or open scrub to thick forest. The 

 open plains of central North America were 

 thronged with big game to a degree that was 

 never true of the vast American forests, whether 

 subarctic, temperate, or tropical. The great 

 game regions of Africa were the endless dry 

 plains of South and East Africa, and not the 

 steaming West African forests. There are, of 

 course, some big mammals that live exclusively 

 on low plants and bushes that only grow in 

 the forest, and some trees at certain seasons 

 yield fruits and nuts which fall to the ground; 

 but, speaking generally, an ordinary full-grown 



