-^ New Light on the Tragedy of Civilisation 



connection with the destruction of the elephant, the 

 rhinoceros, and other animals throughout Africa. This 

 destruction goes on silently, and only a few men who have 

 a special knowledge of the circumstances bring some 

 information about it to the world at large. The rest keep 

 silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing. 



The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, 

 C. J. Anderson and their contemporaries give some idea 

 of what enormous multitudes of wild creatures then wan- 

 dered over the plains of South Africa. We are inclined 

 to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier 

 epochs. The process of animal-destruction by the hand 

 of man has been going on from immemorial times. For 

 thousands of years man has been continually pressing the 

 animal world back more and more, and it has had to give 

 way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going 

 on so slowly and so imperceptibly that it is only by the 

 scanty remnants left from earlier times that we can form 

 some estimate of the wealth that has disappeared. These 

 are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off islands of 

 the world's seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all the 

 uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of 

 this. Not only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but 

 also from some of his contemporaries, we have descriptions 

 of the former abundance of wild life in the Cape districts of 

 South Africa. At that time the country was, in the literal 

 sense of the word, covered with countless herds of Cape 

 buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras, 

 quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse- 

 antelopes, oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, 



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