PROGRESS AND CIVILIZATION 



in the icy waters, until those waters grow red with the 

 heart-blood of these animals, shed by their insistent 

 foes. But soon the tale of the death-fight will sound 

 like a story of olden times, like a fairy tale, and our 

 descendants will view with astonishment, in museums, 

 the poor remnants of an extinct race of mammals. 



What I have said of the whale applies with equal 

 force to many other species of animals irredeemably 

 destined to vanish from the surface of the earth. 



Only a few decades ago, millions of buffaloes grazed 

 on the wide prairies of North America; to-day these 

 millions have followed the shades of the majority of 

 the Indians to their l^eavenly hunting-grounds. And 

 the reason for their extirpation? As Dr. Heck, in his 

 book The Animal Kingdom, has shown, they had to 

 die because they endangered the safety of the Pacific 

 roads. 



So the millions of buffaloes were sacrificed to the rail- 

 roads. Still, in the seventies of the last century an 

 untold number of bison hides were bought and sold ; a 

 few hundred bisons now form the miserable remnants 

 of former riches. Without forethought and against all 

 sound reason, these creatures have been butchered. 



Soon a number of other beautiful and precious species 

 of the North American fauna will follow the fate of the 

 bison. President Roosevelt himself has realized this, 

 and he favors all efforts calculated to delay the in- 

 evitable. 



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