IX. 3 

 SOME INDIRECT RESULTS 



ENUMERATION NOT THE WHOLE STORY 



BUT when we have completed this tale of man's influence 

 upon the numbers and character of the fauna, there is yet 

 more to be told. We have focussed our attention mainly 

 upon first causes and first effects ; we have, as it were, 

 listened to the bursting of a thunderstorm, and arrested by 

 the first great crash, have failed to notice that sound after 

 sound succeeds, reverberating amongst the hills, echoed back 

 by wood and mountain until in a million eddies and whispers 

 it passes beyond human ken. So it is in the animal world ; 

 the chains of circumstance are strong, and the invisible bonds, 

 which link creature with creature and animal life with vege- 

 table, and make each least being a necessary link in the 

 welfare of another, cannot be tampered with without setting 

 loose forces the final workings of which we cannot see : 



Where one step broken, the great scale's destroyed : 

 From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, 

 Tenth, or ten thousandth breaks the chain alike. 



Did the Italians, as they slew wantonly and recklessly 

 their birds of prey, realize that Moles would increase in num- 

 ber and with their burrows riddle those dykes 'laboriously 

 constructed by man to keep in check the river Po, so 

 that many square miles of fertile land have been flooded ? 

 Did the colonists dream of the ultimate influence of the 

 Sparrows and Starlings, the Rabbits and Foxes and Weasels 

 they were so ready to plant in their new lands ? Did the 

 early navigators, who in goodwill to their fellowmen, placed 

 Pigs on many of the islands they touched, suppose that 

 history would lay at their door the total extirpation of the 

 Dodo of Mauritius, and possibly of the Solitaire of 

 Rodriguez ? 



