40 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



The result has been, of course, an immensely greater product 

 of far more valuable and more readily available resources, suffi- 

 cient for a population many thousand times greater and more 

 exacting than any which formerly existed here. The whole 

 process has evidently been a perfectly natural and inevitable 

 one — as much so as the flow of the tide in the wake of the 

 revolving moon — and immensely advantageous, also, from every 

 point of view except that of the inadequate, incompetent and ill- 

 adapted population which it has reduced or suppressed. These 

 native populations were not, however, all unfit for survival under 

 the dominant influence of civilized man, and such as were unfit 

 were not equally so. Some were promptly and completely extin- 

 guished, others slowly and partially so ; some remained undis- 

 turbed by our interference, and some continue more numerous 

 and more prosperous to-day than ever before, because the new 

 conditions established are more favorable to them than were the 

 old. Wolves and wildcats, for example, were soon virtually sup- 

 pressed as unmitigated nuisances, and bufifalo, deer and the 

 prairie hen went as early, or even earlier, because they could not 

 be profitably domesticated, and could not breed, unprotected in 

 the wild, fast enough to make good their losses. The fishes in 

 our larger streams diminished slowly in numbers — if, indeed, 

 taken as a whole, they diminished at all, until recent reclamation 

 projects began to drain and cultivate their spawning places and 

 feeding grounds — and the smaller plants and animals of our 

 waters, upon which the fishes depend for food, were, until quite 

 lately, at least as abundant as they ever were. No native insect 

 species has disappeared from our borders, and several of the 

 most abundant and voracious of them — the most injurious, conse- 

 quently, to our interests — find a far better food in our cultivated 

 crops, and, in our agriculture and horticulture, a system of 

 management far better adapted to their needs, than was the 

 original system which we have displaced. Our resident game 

 birds would all have been gone long ago if it had not been for 

 the restraints of law put upon the activities of the hunter, and 

 the migrant game species are sadly reduced in numbers ; but the 

 smaller seed eaters, fruit eaters and insect eaters among birds are, 

 I believe, more numerous now, on the whole, than they were in 

 the days of the prairie, the Indian and the bufifalo. 



All the various processes of destruction, maintenance, protec- 

 tion, substitution and new introduction to which this state of 

 our fauna is due are still in active operation ; and they are in 



