92 EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 
again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of 
the rural population by the Russian Government. On the 
other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivo- 
rous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the 
multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augment- 
ing the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the 
beaver was extensively employed as a material for hats, it bore 
a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen 
that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When a Parisian 
manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost 
universal use, the demand for beavers’ fur fell off, and this 
animal—whose habits are an important agency in the forma- 
tion of bogs and other modifications of forest nature—im- 
mediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he 
had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare 
enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the 
convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously 
exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical 
geography of a distant continent. 
Since the invention of gunpowder, some quadrupeds have 
completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic 
countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf 
was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the 
bear was extirpated from that island still earlier. The lion is 
believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably 
Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the 
historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet ex- 
tinct in the first-named two of these countries at the time of 
the first Crusade.* 
The British wild ox is extinct except in a few English and 
* Tn maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in 
the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid too much weight on the frequent 
oceurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a his- 
torical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the 
lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria’s time, 
because they are often seen ‘ fighting for the crown”’ in the carvings and 
paintings of that period. Many palxontologists, however, identify the great 
