EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS. 95 
are numerous and destructive to the crops, as well as dangerous 
to travellers, while their tusks are small and of comparatively 
little value, the government pays a small reward for killing 
them. According to Sir Emerson Tennant,* in three years 
prior to 1848, the premium was paid for 3,500 elephants in a 
part of the northern district, and between 1851 and 1856 for 
2,000 in the southern district. Major Rogers, famous as an 
elephant shooter in Ceylon, ceased to count his victims after he 
had slain 1,300, and Cumming in South Africa sacrificed his 
hecatombs every month. 
In spite of the rarity of the chamois, his cautious shyness, and 
the comparative inaccessibility of his favorite haunts, Colani 
of Pontresina, who died in 1837, had killed not less than 2,000 
of these animals; Kiing, who is still living in the Upper Enga- 
dine, 1,500; Hitz, 1,300, and Zwichian equal number; Soldani 
shot 1,100 or 1,200 in the mountains which enclose the Val 
Bregaglia, and there are many living hunters who can boast of 
having killed from 500 to 800 of these interesting quadrupeds. t 
In America, the chase of the larger quadrupeds is not less 
destructive. In a late number of the American Naturalist, 
the present annual slaughter of the bison is calculated at the 
enormous number of 500,000, and the elk, the moose, the cari- 
bou, and the more familiar species of deer furnish, perhaps, as 
many victims. The most fortunate deer-hunter I have person- 
ally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the 
northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is 
said to have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless 
exceeded by zealous Nimrods of the West. 
But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the fur- 
trade furnish the most surprising results. Russia sends annu- 
* Natural History of Ceylon, chap. iv. 
+ Although it is only in the severest cold of winter that the chamois descends 
to the vicinity of grounds occupied by man, its organization does not confine 
it to the mountains. In the royal park of Racconigi, on the plaina few miles 
from Turin, at a height of less than 1,000 feet, is kept a herd of thirty or 
forty chamois, which thrive and breed apparently as well as in the Alps. 
