146 PRIMITIVE ANIMALS 



or from Japan, and who still retained the tradition 

 of Moa hunts when they were discovered by the 

 Europeans in the seventeenth century. The advent 

 of the Maoris sealed the fate of the Moa, and the 

 Maori himself was to disappear before the invasion 

 of a race superior to himself in the arts of civilization 

 and destruction. 



But the ever expanding activity of man has now 

 penetrated into the heart of every continent, and the 

 vast stretches of once unoccupied territory no longer 

 afford a safer asylum to wild animals than the oceanic 

 islands. The Savannahs of Australia have had their 

 population of kangaroo and opossums terribly thinned 

 since the occupation of the British, and the continent 

 of Africa south of the Sahara, which has harboured 

 in a safe retreat all the finest products of Mammalian 

 development, is losing its animal population with 

 astonishing rapidity. A picture of what South Africa 

 must have been a century or more ago is afforded by 

 parts of Uganda at the present time, where vast herds 

 of antelope, giraffe and zebra wander over the plains, 

 where rhinoceros and lions and great herds of elephant 

 are still abundant. But the British and Dutch in 

 South Africa have exterminated or at least decimated 

 the big game, and in East Africa inland from Mombasa 

 it has already been found necessary to form an arti- 

 ficial sanctum for the wild animals, and everywhere to 

 restrict the depredations of hunters. The preservation 



