THE DECADENCE OF GREAT GAME 281 



difficult wilds their numbers are daily and hourly 

 diminishing, so that apparently in a few more years 

 the great game of all Southern Africa will be but a 

 memory. 



In India the same war of extermination has been, 

 and is incessantly, waged, and with the same results. 

 The Indian lion, the great mailed rhinoceros, the 

 gaur, buffalo, sambur, bear, even the tiger itself, and 

 many other species of great game are vanishing 

 rapidly. In other countries the same process is 

 going busily forward, at the hands of white and 

 native hunters, with apparently the same inevitable 

 ending — extermination, complete and utter. 



It cannot, of course, be contended that dangerous 

 carnivora, such as the lion, tiger, leopard, wolf, and 

 other beasts, are to be preserved in countries where 

 man is seeking the means of existence. But surely 

 some strong effort should be made, before it is too 

 late, to stay the complete extinction of useful, rare, 

 beautiful, and defenceless game — such, for instance, 

 as the African elephant, the giraffe, rhinoceros, and 

 many of the finer of the deer and antelope, and wild 

 bovine races. 



The pursuit of game has, of course, many strong 

 things to be said in ifcs favour. It is a natural and 

 apparently quite irrepressible instinct of man — an 

 attribute which, no doubt, originally formed a part of 

 that strongest of all human instincts, self-preserva^ 



