ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 



1623 



this is not evolution. These are merely unstable 

 toys of man; living but artificial; parasitic pup- 

 pets which have no existence apart from yard 

 or cote. Even the semi-feral rat who gnaws 

 his way into our cold storage warehouse and 

 there in course of time grows a longer coat of 

 fur. can hope for nothing. In a hundred gen- 

 erations his brood would perhaps begin life less 

 naked than today. Hut in five generations the 

 cold-storage warehouse will have become so im- 

 portant a feature in the hoarding of food for 

 hungry masses of humanity that it will be ren- 

 dered rat-proof. Even a long-haired race of 

 rats is a futile hope ! 



The only reason why the splendid wild crea- 

 tures of the earth have held their own as well 

 as they have, is because man in his travels has 

 hitherto been confined to practically two planes 

 of space. We see what incomparable success 

 has been given to the world of insects and of 

 birds by flight. Rising physically, the one above 

 their worm-like ancestors, the other soaring over 

 their reptilian forebears, without strength or 

 weapons they have outstripped all other crea- 

 tures and today divide the earth with mankind; 

 at once his best friends and his most dangerous 

 enemies. Our imagination readily pictures the 

 future when the very few years have passed 

 which separate us from complete success in this 

 aerial field (today our very language is still 

 of the earth, earthy !) Then, the most isolated 

 of nesting haunts and the uttermost routes of 

 migration will be bared to the commoner — the 

 aerial pot-hunter. The farthest recesses of New 

 Guinea mountains and of Brazilian jungle will 

 be tragically accessible to man. And with the 

 entering of mankind into the third plane of 

 space, earth will wholly cease from her age-old. 

 epoch-slow unrolling of the glories and myste- 

 ries of terrestrial organic evolution. 



Earth will cease, I said. — I should have said 

 dry land, for just beyond low tidal mark, na- 

 ture will still defy mankind. And in these icy, 

 silent, lightless ocean depths, life will still be 

 undisturbed. Thousands of air-ships will come 

 slowly sinking through the blue water overhead. 

 but only to form a resting place, for a brief sea- 

 son, for barnacles and worms; then to dissolve 

 to ooze. 



This is a brief of the more distant future. 

 For the present we should redouble our efforts 

 to preserve at least the nobler animals and birds 

 for a few generations. 



II. Destruction 

 A period of seventeen months spent in Asia 

 and the East Indies studying the life-histories 

 of wild pheasants, left me with a decidedly pes- 



simistic outlook as regards even the more imme- 

 diate future of these splendid birds. I realized 

 that even if I repeated the trip at once there 

 were some which I should not be able to see 

 again. The agencies working against the vari- 

 ous pheasants were multiple and cumulative. 

 and all had to do. directly or indirectly, with 

 the changes wrought by the invading Caucasian, 

 or at least the influence of his habits, weapons 

 and diet. 



In India and Burma, where for untold gen- 

 erations the law of the ancient religions has 

 been kind to the life of wild creatures, there is, 

 in the more out of the way places, a slackening 

 of this gentle religious feeling. With the in- 

 crease of sportsmen, and the disregard of Sa- 

 hibs in general for the wild creatures, there has 

 been diffused a conscious, or unconscious laxity, 

 hardly noticeable to the casual onlooker, but 

 diseernable when away from the more densely 

 populated centers. In some isolated districts 

 this takes the form of wholesale trapping, the 

 indirectness of this mode of taking life serving 

 to gloss over the ultimate result. Thus also do 

 the fishermen of some of the southern coasts 

 keep faith with themselves and their belief. 

 They cast their nets and enmesh whole schools 

 of fish, but then hasten with them to the beach, 

 and gently and considerately lay their catch 

 upon soft grass and moss. Later, when the fish 

 ermen return, they express a naive surprise to 

 find that the fish have expired, when of course 

 they are available for food with not the slight- 

 est infringement of the law. If this disregard 

 for tradition should ever become more wide- 

 spread it would work havoc with the trusting 

 peafowl and junglefowl which scream and crow 

 near the villages, and the kalee^e which fatten 

 on the crops of rice and barley. 



In the Malay States and elsewhere another 

 factor becomes apparent. One may ride for 

 mile after mile and, instead of primeval jungle, 

 see nothing but hundreds of thousands of spind- 

 ling rubber trees, sprouting from raw. fresh 

 earth with no hint of the marvelous fauna and 

 flora, the orchids, the birds, the four-footed 

 creatures of the deep jungle, which peopled this 

 land shortly before. This is as it should be; 

 man is stronger and is inheriting the earth, but 

 it is sad to see the age-old course of things so 

 suddenly, so blatantly interrupted. The call of 

 the fireback and the wonderful cry of the argus 

 never resound among these saplings, planted 

 with mathematical accuracy and cherished with 

 the care which a lucrative future demands. 



Wherever the Englishman holds sway, there 

 the pheasant gets fair play and a chance for the 



