HOW SPECIES PERISH. 231 



man has done more perhaps to exterminate the larger 

 and the more helpless forms of life than any other 

 cause. This war of extinction is spreading, and birds 

 and beasts, especially the largest of the latter, are slowly 

 but surely going the way of their ancient relations, 

 disappearing for ever before the scientific war of 

 extermination waged against them. It needs no vivid 

 stretch of the imagination to picture the time when all 

 this " big game " will become extinct, its extermination 

 being one of the great events which mark the progress 

 of intellect and civilization. Well may the naturalist 

 mourn this scientific killing off of these few last grand 

 results of a planet's evolution. We can picture the time 

 when scientists of the future will look back on the 

 existence of what few huge beasts are living now and 

 even of savage man (for civilised man will eventually 

 exterminate his savage brother) with a curious and it 

 may be even an incredulous wonderment ! From the 

 period of the grand culminating triumph of Life's 

 development, the appearance of Man, shall we date the 

 dawn of its physical deterioration ? Surely it seems so, 

 and that the being which has crowned the genealogical 

 tree of Life has proved to be one of the greatest agents 

 of its destruction, and by his superior and ever- 

 increasing mental powers his God-like intellect he 

 has worked the extermination and extinction of those 

 mighty creatures that before his advent roamed and 

 reigned on the earth supreme. 



