CHAPTER XXIII 



THE DECADENCE OF GEEAT GAME 



Approaching extinction of game — Fifty years since— Present 

 decadence — The cliase an irresistible instinct— Famous 

 hunters — Amenemhat I and Tliothmes III — Koman waste 

 of animal life — Native hunters — Introduction of firearms — 

 The Cape in 1652 — Crowds of game — The Boers as hunters 

 — Great game in 1796 — Hunters and travellers — Burchell — 

 Sir A. Smith — Corn wall is Harris — Other English hunters 

 — The emigrant Boers — Their destruction of game — Great 

 waste of animal life — Gordon Gumming — Immense migra- 

 tions of Springbok — Baldwin and Selous — Character of the 

 great hunters — Game of Cape Colony in recent years — 

 Game in the interior in 1890-91 — A vanishing fauna — 

 Mashonaland — Ineffectuality of game laws — Proposed park 

 for preservation of game. 



It seems probable that oar descendants and suc- 

 cessors will succeed to a world in which well-nigh 

 all that is wild, natural, and beautiful has been 

 crushed and improved out of existence, and from 

 which almost every beautiful bird, every rare specimen 

 of feral life has been eliminated. 



Fifty years ago, if any traveller or sportsman 

 passing through the prairies of North America, then 



crowded with unnumbered millions of bison, or trek- 

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