A RETROSPECT 485 



The importance of cultivation of the soil from the point 

 of view of increasing animal life cannot be over-estimated. 

 The vegetation of even an indifferent pasture is much more 

 abundant than the yield of the same ground unfilled, and the 

 value, as feeding stuff, of the produce of an equal field of 

 grain is greater still. Good arable land can be made to 

 yield more and more under intensive methods of cultivation 

 so that, acre for acre, the food-supply has multiplied many 

 times since man turned the first sod in Scotland. When to 

 this increased yield, due wholly to the skill of agriculture, 

 we add the crops of such land formerly almost unpro- 

 ductive of even wild vegetation as has been reclaimed 

 from the marshes and sandhills, or stolen from the forest, 

 we gain some vague idea of the increase in vegetable food 

 which has resulted from the cultivation of close on five 

 million acres, one quarter of the total land area of Scotland. 



Almost all this increased yield of vegetation has been 

 added to the natural food supply of the inhabitants of 

 Scotland, man and beast, to their enormous multiplication 

 in numbers. Finches and grain-eating birds, Rabbits, Rats. 

 Mice, and vegetarian animals in general, as well as the 

 Stoats, Weasels, and beasts and birds of prey which feed upon 

 them, have benefited by the bounty of the fields : but most 

 important of all, man himself has multiplied, and has been 

 enabled to increase his domesticated stock far beyond the 

 natural bearing capacity of the country. 



In another way, man has laboured for the increase in 

 numbers of certain elements in the fauna, by affording them 

 protection from indiscriminate slaughter and by encouraging 

 their multiplication for the sake of sport, for their own in- 

 trinsic value, or for the pleasure their presence gives him. 

 This direct protection has been on the whole far less 

 effective from the faunistic point of view than might have 

 been supposed, partly because any success it met with merely 

 stimulated increased slaughter, partly because it was often 

 applied to animals already on the downgrade from causes 

 other than direct destruction, and partly because it tended 

 to clash with agricultural developments and improvements. 

 Yet it has succeeded in preserving for us the Red Deer, 

 which, otherwise, would almost certainly have been exter- 

 minated long ago, as were its relatives ; it has succeeded in 



