42 REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 



is now unprocurable except by the fitting out of a costly expe- 

 dition, with the remote chance of obtaining a single adult, 

 though such an expedition will probably be more successful in 

 procuring the young. 



Something much like this may be said of the giant moose 

 and of other of our semiarctic fauna. The buffalo is so 

 nearly gone, even from its shelter in the Yellowstone National 

 Park, that the stockade which the Institution erected there to 

 secure and "gentle' 1 part of the few buffalo remaining, is fall- 

 ing down without a single one ever having been in it. Taught 

 by the hopelessness of previous applications, the Secretary 

 has limited his request for this purpose to an immediate appro- 

 priation of $15,000, with the now faint hope of securing some 

 of the young of these vanishing creatures — the great bear, the 

 great moose, and the like. The Secretary is prepared to soon 

 abandon recommendations which have been urged for nearly 

 ten years, not only because they have been so far made in 

 vain, but because some term must be set in which they will 

 have too evidently grown useless from the disappearance of 

 the animal races in question. 



As to the best means of securing the protection of these 

 races, he has acquired in this long effort some practical knowl- 

 edge of the difficulties and of the simple but effective remedy 

 which can be applied. The subject is too large a one, how- 

 ever, to treat here, and he will only say that these creatures, if 

 secured and transported immediately from their native haunts, 

 are most unlikely to live under the conditions of civilization. 

 They are, on the contrary, very likely to live and even to per- 

 petuate their species if taken with care and kept surrounded 

 by the protection that experience and common sense suggest; 

 and both these mean the continuance of the present National 

 Zoological Park here under the e} r es of Congress, but with a 

 simultaneous provision for first bringing up the wild animals 

 in a commodious place of confinement in the country where 

 they belong (one in Alaska, for instance), large enough to allow 

 them to live without a sense of captivity, on their ordinary food, 

 and in their ordinary climate. This place might be a small 

 ranch, where the things of vital importance after their capture 

 and security — namely, their being "gentled" and accustomed 

 to the sight of the keeper before being transferred to Washing- 

 ton — can be carried out. Such a ranch can be established at a 



