480 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. 
and hills have preserved until recent times a fauna rich in individuals and 
species. The most casual glance at the volumes by sportsmen and naturalists 
written forty or fifty years ago reveals the delight and wonder of travel in 
India so comparatively recently as the time when the Association last met in 
Dundee. Sir H. H. Johnston has borne witness that even in 1895 a journey 
‘through almost any part of India was of absorbing interest to the naturalist.’ 
All is changed now, and there seems little doubt but that the devastation in the 
wonderful mammalian fauna has been wrought chiefly by British military officers 
and civilians, partly directly and partly by their encouragement of the sporting 
instincts of the Mohammedan population and the native regiments, although the 
clearing of forests and the draining of marshlands have played an important 
contributory part. The tiger has no chance against the modern rifle. The one- 
horned rhinoceros has been nearly exterminated in Northern India and Assam. 
The magnificent gaur, one of the most splendid of living creatures, has been 
almost killed off throughout the’ limits of its range—Southern India and the 
Malay Peninsula. Bears and wolves, wild dogs and leopards are persecuted 
remorselessly. Deer and antelope have been reduced to numbers that alarm even 
the most thoughtless sportsmen, and wild sheep and goats are being driven to the 
utmost limits of their range. 
When I speak of the fauna of Africa, I am always being reminded of the huge 
and pathless areas of the Dark Continent, and assured that lions and leopards, 
elephants and giraife still exist in countless numbers, nor do I forget the dim 
recesses of the tropical forests where creatures still lurk of which we have only 
the vaguest rumour. But we know that South Africa less than fifty years ago 
was a dream that surpassed the imagination of the most ardent hunter. And we 
know what it is now. It is traversed by railways, it has been rolled over by the 
devastations of war. The game that once covered the land in unnumbered millions 
is now either extinct, like the quagga and the black wildebeeste, or its scanty 
remnant lingers in a few reserves and on a few farms. The sportsman and the 
hunter have been driven to other parts of the continent, and I have no confidence 
in the future of the African fauna. The Mountains of the Moon are within range 
of a Long Vacation holiday. Civilisation is eating into the land from every side. 
All the great European countries are developing their African possessions. There 
are exploring expeditions, punitive expeditions, shooting and collecting expedi- 
tions. Railways are being pushed inland, water-routes opened up. The land is 
being patrolled and policed and taxed, and the wild animals are suffering. Let 
us go back for a moment to the Transvaal and consider what has happened since 
the Rand was opened, neglecting the reserves. Lions are nearly extinct. The 
hyena has been trapped and shot and poisoned out of existence. The eland is 
extinct. The giraffe is extinct. The elephant is extinct. The rhinoceros is 
extinct. The buffalo is extinct. The bontebok, the red hartebeeste, the moun- 
tain zebra, the oribi, and the grysbok are so rare as to be practically extinct. 
And the same fate may at any time overtake the restyof Africa. The white man 
has learned to live in the tropics; he is mastering tropical diseases ; he has need 
of the vegetable and mineral wealth that lie awaiting him, and although there 
is yet time to save the African fauna, it is in imminent peril. 
When we turn to Australia, with its fauna of unique zoological interest, we 
come to a more advanced case of the same disease. In 1909 Mr. G. C. Short- 
ridge, a very skilled collector, working for the British Museum, published in the 
‘Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London ’ the results of an investigation 
he had carried out on the fauna of Western Australia south of the tropics, during 
the years 1904-1907. He gave a map showing the present and comparatively 
recent distribution for each of the species of Marsupials and Monotremes indi- 
genous to that locality, West Australia as yet has been very much less affected 
by civilisation than Queensland, New South Wales or Victoria, and yet in practi- 
cally every case there was found evidence of an enormous recent restriction of 
the range of the species. Marsupials and Monotremes are, as you know, rather 
stupid animals, with small powers of adaptation to new conditions, and they 
are in the very gravest danger of complete extinction. In the island of Tasmania, 
the thylacine, or marsupial wolf, and the Tasmanian devil have unfortunately 
incurred the just hostility of the stock raiser and poultry farmer, and the date 
of their final extermination is approaching at a pace that must be reckoned by 
months rather than by years. 
