230 REV. G. S. DOBBIE ON INFLUENCE OF CIVILIZATION 
diseases to which domestic cattle and large game are liable. 
Stricter vigilance has been enforced within the last few years, 
however, and at the present day the Bjelowjesha herd is 
reported to be several hundred strong. 
In the Caucasus the bison will probably maintain its 
existence much longer than in Lithuania; but while its 
southern domain is less restricted and less accessible, it is 
relatively difficult to guard, and poachers still succeed in 
eluding the foresters and helping themselves to this invalu- 
able property of the Czar. About a thousand head were 
recently supposed to inhabit the Kuban valley; but there 
the animals are extremely shy and difficult to approach, so 
that the estimates of their numbers furnished by Russian 
officials are most likely exaggerated. At all events, while 
the elk, whose range of distribution extends in the Old 
World from the Atlantic eastward to the Pacific, and in 
North America from the Pacific eastward to the Atlantic, 
may survive till an indefinite period in districts remote from 
civilization, the date of the bison’s utter extinction cannot 
be far distant. Indeed, of all wild ruminants it may be 
safely predicated, that in regions inhabited by civilized man 
their presence will be tolerated only when the food which 
they consume is counterbalanced by the value of their 
carcasses, or by the pleasure which their slaughter affords 
the wealthy sportsman. 
The same stern conditions are imposed upon the Wild 
Boar (Sus scrofa), the ‘‘Monarch of the Marshes,” the last 
animal we have now to mention. In his own kingdom he 
has a right to the roots and truffles on which he subsists ; 
but the devastation which his invasions bring upon the culti- 
vated land is too dreadful to go unavenged ; and though the 
enormous area of his habitat precludes all possibility of his 
extermination being accomplished in the immediate future, 
the territory which he has lost in Europe in modern times 
is truly startling. Nowhere in the middle of the Continent 
can he be said to enjoy a state of real freedom ; and even in 
Russia, whose vast swamps and forests he can still traverse 
for hundreds of miles with little interruption, his increase 
has been checked to such a degree that in spite of his for- 
midable character, his reputed longevity, his gregarious ten- 
