Chapter XXII. 



THE EXTINCTION OF THE TRUE 

 QUAGGA (EQUUS QUAGGA). 



IT is a melancholy thing to chronicle the final 

 disappearance from its ancient primeval habitat 

 of one of the most beautiful forms of animal 

 life ; but there is now, I fear, no longer any 

 reasonable doubt that the true quagga — quacha 

 of the Hottentots — Equus quagga of Linnaeus — 

 must be numbered in the increasing catalogue of 

 extinct creatures. 



During my former stay in Cape Colony, I made 

 many inquiries in various parts of the country as to 

 the date of the final disappearance of this animal 

 from within the colonial limits, and from the 

 information I then obtained, I should be inclined 

 to place its extinction south of the Orange River, 

 between the years i860 and 1865. Cape Colony 

 is a wide territory, and its remote parts are to this 

 day almost as unnoticed and unknown as they were 

 at the beginning of the century ; and for this reason, 

 it is very difficult to place exactly — even to a few 

 years — the actual extinction of its disappearing 

 fauna. In the Orange Free State, where it roamed, 

 not so very many years since, even more freely than 

 of old in the Cape Colony, the quagga lingered to 

 a much later period ; but even there it would seem 

 for some years past to have become quite extinct. 



