-^ A Dying Race of Giants 



Meanwhile powder and shot are at work day and night 

 in the Dark Continent. It is not the white man himself 

 who does most of the work of destruction ; it is the native 

 who obtains the greater part of the ivory used in commerce. 

 Two subjects of Manga Bell, for instance, killed a short 

 time back, in the space of a year and a half, elephants 

 enough to provide one hundred and thirty-nine large 

 tusks for their chief! There is no way of changing matters 

 except by completely disarming the African natives. 

 Unless this is done, in a very short time the elephant 

 will only be found in the most inaccessible and unhealthy 

 districts. It does not much matter whether this comes 

 about in a single decade or in several. What are thirty 

 or forty or fifty years, in comparison with the endless 

 ages that have gone to the evolution of these wonderful 

 animals ? It is remarkable, too, that in spite of all the 

 hundreds of African elephants which are being killed, 

 not a single museum in the whole world possesses one 

 of the gigantic male elephants which were once so 

 numerous, but which are now so rarely to be met with. 

 Accompanying this chapter is a photograph of the heaviest 

 elephant- tusks which have ever reached the coast from 

 the interior. The two tusks together weigh about 

 450 pounds. One can form some idea of the size of the 

 elephant which carried them ! I was unfortunately unable 

 to obtain these tusks for Germany, although they were 

 taken from German Africa. They were sent to America, 

 and sold for nearly ^1,000. 



I should like the reader to note, also, the illustration 

 showing a room in an ivory factory. The number of 



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