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increase in its use by civilised and barbarous man. Sometimes the pretext is 
sport, sometimes wanton destructiveness rules. The extermination of beasts-ot- 
prey, the clearing of soil for stock or crops, the securing of meat, the commercial 
pursuit of hides and horns and of furs and feathers, all play their part. Varmers 
and settlers on the outskirts of civilisation accuse the natives, and allege that the 
problem would be solved were no firearms allowed to any but themselves. Sports- 
men accuse other sportsmen, whom they declare to be no real sportsmen, and 
every person whose object is not sport. The great museums, in the name of 
science, and the rich amateur collectors press forward to secure the last specimens 
of moribund species. 
But even apart from such deliberate and conscious agencies, the near presence 
of man is inhospitable to wild life. As he spreads over the earth, animals wither 
before him, driven from their haunts, deprived of their food, perishing from new 
diseases. It is part of a general biological process. From time to time, in the 
past history of the world, a species, favoured by some happy kink of structure 
or fortunate accident of adaptability, has become dominant. It has increased 
greatly in numbers, outrunning its natal bounds, and has radiated in every possible 
direction, conquering woodland and prairies, the hills and the plains, transcend- 
ing barriers that had seemed impassable, and perhaps itself breaking up into new 
local races and varieties. It must be long since such a triumphant progress was 
unattended by death and destruction. When the first terrestrial animals crept 
out of their marshes into the clean air of the dry land, they had only plants and 
the avenging pressure of physical forces to overcome. But when the Amphibians 
were beaten by the Reptiles, and when from amongst the Reptiles some insigni- 
ficant species acquired the prodigious possibility of transformation to Mammals, 
and still more when amongst the Mammals Eutherian succeeded Marsupial, Carni- 
vore the Creodont, and Man the Ape, it could have been only after a fatal contest 
that the newcomers triumphed. The struggle, we must suppose, was at first most 
acute between animals and their nearest inferior allies, as similarity of needs 
brings about the keenest competition, but it must afterwards have been extended 
against lower and lower occupants of the coveted territory. 
The human race has for long been the dominant terrestrial species, and man 
has a wider capacity for adaptation to different environments and an infinitely 
greater power of transcending geographical barriers than have been enjoyed by 
any other set of animals. For a considerable time many of the more primitive 
tribes, especially before the advent of firearms, had settled down into a kind of 
natural equilibrium with the local mammalian fauna, but these tribes have been 
first driven to a keener competition with the lower animals, and then, in most 
parts of the world, have themselves been forced almost or completely out of 
existence. The resourceful and aggressive higher races have now reached into 
the remotest parts of the earth and have become the exterminators. It must now 
be the work of the most intelligent and provident amongst us to arrest this course 
of destruction and to preserve what remains. 
In Europe, unfortunately, there is little left sufficiently large and important 
to excite the imagination. There is the European bison, which has been extinct 
in Western Europe for many centuries, whilst the last was killed in East Prussia 
in 1755. There remains a herd of about seven hundred in the forests of 
Lithuania, strictly protected by the Tsar, whilst there are truly wild animals, in 
considerable numbers, in the Caucasus, small captive herds on the private estates 
of the Tsar, the Duke of Pless, and Count Potocki, and a few individuals in 
various Zoological Gardens. There is the beaver, formerly widespread in Europe, 
now one of the rarest of living mammals, and lingering in minute numbers in the 
Rhone, the Danube, in a few Russian rivers and in protected areas in Scandi- 
navia. The wolf and the bear have shrunk to the recesses of thick forests and the 
remotest mountains, gluttons to the most barren regions of the north. The 
chamois survives by favour of game-laws and the vast inaccessible areas to which 
it can retreat, but the mouflon of Corsica and Sardinia and the ibex in Spain 
are on the verge of extinction. Every little creature, from the otter, wild cat and 
marten to the curious desman, is disappearing. 
India contains the richest, the most varied, and, from many points of view, 
the most interesting part of the Asiatic fauna. Notwithstanding the teeming 
human population it has supported from time immemorial, the extent of its area, 
its dense forests and jungles, its magnificent series of river valleys, mountains, 
