8 NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



These figures may serve to suggest what a little way 

 human dominion as yet extends over the animal life of the 

 world and how much remains to be done.^ 



Somewhat of sadness attaches to the column '* fossil 

 species." We shall never see any of these alive upon the 

 earth again. Among their number were the largest and 

 most powerful animals that the world has ever produced 

 or will ever see again, the animal kings of creation for 

 their epochs : the mammoth, a third taller and more than 

 twice the weight of our elephant ; the mastodon, larger 

 still; the Irish elk, the gigantic, Cervus gigaitteus, and its 

 American cousin, C. Americaniis ; the largest members 

 of the deer family, animals that used to square accounts 

 with antlers that measured eleven feet from tip to tip ; an 

 American lion, Fclis atrox, as large as the Asiatic species ; 

 at least two bisons of enormous size, one with horns that 

 measured fully ten feet across, — all are past and gone. 

 Probably man has been responsible for the extermination 

 of most of the larger species within recent geologic time, 

 and in the process of subjugation it would seem that he has 

 been needlessly severe. Men had little use for menageries 

 then, but now what would we not give to see some of 

 those wonders of the world in life again ! 



What is more to the point, extermination of animal 

 species is now going on, and at a rate never before 

 equaled. With modern rifles, shotguns, and dynamite 

 bombs, coupled with modern steamships and railroads, by 

 which the remotest corners of the earth become readily 



^ Shaler speaks of " near a hundred animals " that man has domesti- 

 cated. Domesticated AnUnals. Their Relation to Majt and to his Advance- 

 ment in Civilizatioti, p. 219. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1895. 



