NATIONAL GAME PRESERVES 119 



River. I need not enlarge upon the fascinating spectacles of 

 the hot springs or the geysers, waterfalls and other natural 

 wonders which attract sightseers to this district. 



Since the opening of the Yellowstone Park, largely owing 

 to the efforts of the Boone and Crockett Club and its founder 

 Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, many other game and forest pre- 

 serves have been established in the United States. The 

 American Bison Society and the New York Zoological Society 

 also worked incessantly towards the same end, so that at pre- 

 sent over seven million acres in the United States are devoted 

 to the preservation of the native fauna and flora. The two 

 largest enclosures are the Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, and 

 the Grand Canon Game Preserve in Arizona. This growth of 

 sentiment in favour of protecting animals and plants from 

 destruction has also spread beyond the borders of the States- 

 into Canada, and induced the authorities there to imitate these 

 beneficent measures. In their enthusiasm to vie with their 

 neighbours, Canadians have even provided game preserves 

 which exceed in size the largest of those referred to, for the 

 new Jasper Park in Alberta has an area of nearly three and a 

 half million acres, while Kocky Mountain Park in Alberta 

 has two million seven hundred thousand acres. Two others 

 have over a million acres. 



Hidden game preserves of the past life of North America, 

 as I mentioned before, lie among the vast accumulations of 

 Tertiary rocks in the same mountains that shelter the modern 

 representatives of the American fauna. In the beginning of 

 the chapter I just alluded to the names of some of the more 

 important deposits and the geological formations they belong 

 to. Enough is now known of the remains of the animals con- 

 tained in these deposits to enable palaeontologists to compare 

 their relationship with that of fossil assemblies of animals in 

 other continents. Professor H. F. Osborn has recently pub- 

 lished an excellent summary of our knowledge of these western 

 beds and their mammalian fauna, and I cannot do better than 

 quote some of his conclusions. 



The Eocene Tertiaries of the mountain region, lying in the 

 Rockies and west of them, were partly formed by the post- 

 Cretaceous or post-Laramie uplift, accompanied by great 

 volcanic activity, lava flows and eruptions of volcanic dust, and 



