-* Xe\v Light on the Tragedy of Civilisation 



elephants gathered together in one herd on the open 

 velt. Unfortunately, like so many others, he published 

 very few sketches. 



Gordon Gumming, a traveller well known to the 

 German public through Brehms' Tierleben, has also left 

 us sketches of those days that corroborate the descrip- 

 tions given by his contemporaries. He tells how, in the 

 year 1860, a great drive was organised in the Orange 

 Free State in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh, after- 

 wards Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The number 

 of wild animals driven together by the natives, which 

 included zebras, quaggas, gnus, cow-antelopes, blessbock, 

 springbocks, and ostriches, was estimated at five-and-twenty 

 thousand. The number killed on this one day was 

 reckoned at about six thousand animals, and a number 

 ot natives were trampled to death by the herds of wild 

 beasts. 



At this time there were still Europeans in South Africa 

 who made elephant-hunting their ordinary business. Now 

 there are neither elephants nor indeed any other kind of 

 wild animal in numbers worth mentioning in these once 

 rich hunting grounds. They have all been killed off in 

 the course of a hundred years. Where once hundreds 

 of thousands of gnus lived their life, there are now only 

 a few hundred specimens carefully preserved and guarded. 

 And the same is the case with all other wild animals. 

 Many species are gone completely and for ever. A similar 

 process will go on slowly but surely throughout the whole 

 of Africa, wherever civilisation penetrates. There is only 

 one chance of the beautiful wild life of Africa being 



