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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 925 



Peninsula. Bears and wolves, wild dogs 

 and leopards are persecuted remorselessly. 

 Deer and antelope have been reduced to 

 numbers that alarm even the most thought- 

 less 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 giraffe still exist in countless numbers, 

 nor do I forget the dim recesses of the trop- 

 ical forests where creatures still lurk of 

 which we have only the vaguest rumor. 

 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 tra- 

 veled by railways, it has been rolled over 

 by the devastations of war. The game that 

 once covered the land in unnmnbered mil- 

 lions 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 con- 

 tinent, and I have no confidence in the 

 future of the African fauna. The moun- 

 tains of the moon are within range of a 

 long vacation holiday. Civilization is eat- 

 ing into the land from every side. All the 

 great European countries are developing 

 their African possessions. There are ex- 

 ploring expeditions, punitive expeditions, 

 shooting and collecting expeditions. Rail- 

 ways are being pushed inland, water-routes 

 opened up. The land is being patrolled 

 and policed and taxed, and the wild ani- 

 mals 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 exist- 



ence. The eland is extinct. The giraffe is 

 extinct. The elephant is extinct. The 

 rhinoceros is extinct. The buffalo is ex- 

 tinct. The bontebok, the red hartebeeste, 

 the mountain zebra, the oribi and the grys- 

 bok are so rare as to be practically extinct. 

 And the same fate may at any time over- 

 take the rest of 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. Shortridge, a very skilled 

 collector, working for the British Museum, 

 published in the Proceedings of the Zoolog- 

 ical 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 com- 

 paratively recent distribution for each of 

 the species of marsupials and monotremes 

 indigenous to that locality. West Aus- 

 tralia as yet has been very much less af- 

 fected by civilization than Queensland, 

 New South Wales or Victoria, and yet in 

 practically every case there was found evi- 

 dence 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 hos- 

 tility of the stock raiser and poultry 

 farmer, and the date of their final extermi- 

 nation is approaching at a pace that must 



