242 DELIBERATE INTRODUCTION OF NEW ANIMALS 



and British Columbia, and in New Zealand even the Red 

 Deer and the Moose have been set at liberty. Lastly, he 

 needs must be ministered to by the domestic creatures and 

 cultivated crops which stood him in good stead in his earlier 

 home. The habit of transportation of animals is older 

 than the Neolithic invasions of Britain, and to-day trans- 

 oceanic trade has become a constant factor in the home 

 breeding of stock. 



Often the introductions are successful and turn out to 

 be of the greatest value. How much poorer Europe would 

 be did it lack the domestic animals of the East and the 

 American potato and tomato; how much poorer America, 

 with its domestic stock limited to its native llamas, and 

 without the wheat, rye and oats, the pears and apples, the 

 hemp and 'flax which reached it from Europe after Columbus 

 had pointed the way. Still more is the prosperity of the 

 "new countries" bound up with man's power of trying afresh 

 the successful experiments of the old countries. The sheep 

 and cattle, the sugar-cane and wheat of Australia; the wheat 

 and wool of New Zealand; Canada's grain crops, her flocks 

 and her herds ; all of them are foreign to the lands they have 

 made prosperous, one and all man has brought them to the 

 new soil and tended them to new fruitfulness. 



Not all the experiments of introduction have been so suc- 

 cessful as those just mentioned. There have been many 

 failures. Often conditions of soil and climate, of food, or of 

 relationship to the original inhabitants, prove too trying to the 

 enforced immigrants and they or their few successors wither 

 and die out. So it has been in Scotland, to cite only two 

 examples, with the Reindeer and the Beaver, which have been 

 allowed to run free in the hope that they would again make 

 a permanent home in a country they once frequented ; and so 

 it is with several of the foreign species of Trout with which 

 time and again attempts have been made to stock our rivers 

 and lochs. So it has been also in New Zealand with the 

 Bullfinch, the Turtle Dove, the Robin Redbreast, the Grey 

 Linnet, the Lapwing, and the Partridge. 



On the other hand, sometimes the results of such an 

 experiment outrun the expectations or wishes of its origin- 

 ator, so that its success becomes a measure of its harmfulness 

 and an index to the rashness of man in endeavouring to 



