EXTINCTION OF THE TRUE QUAGGA. 401 



last quaggas ever seen were shot near the Tiger Berg, 

 a solitary mountain, springing from the plains not 

 far from Aberdeen, in the year 1858. There were 

 two then remaining, and my informant, with whom 

 I stayed while in Cape Colony, near this very spot, 

 well remembered their being shot. Further north 

 in the Colony, as I have said, they lingered to a 

 still later date. Their skins were used for grain 

 sacks, and I have seen old quagga-skin sacks still 

 in use in a Dutch farmhouse. 



Some twenty or twenty-five years back the Boers 

 of the Orange Free State suddenly awoke to the 

 fact that in the skins of the quagga and Burchell's 

 zebra and other game they possessed a mine of 

 wealth, and they at once set about the task of 

 exterminating these animals. The mine took some 

 years to work out ; but the task is now complete, 

 and many a farmer looks back with keen but 

 unavailing regret to the glorious hunting veldt of 

 the past. 



In the hide trade the skins of these animals have 

 been in great demand for years past, and the 

 avaricious Boers were not slow to avail themselves 

 of this demand. The bone-strewn plains of the 

 Free State bear miserable testimony to the feverish 

 haste and deadly methods of the skin-hunters of 

 the past twenty years. The work was done with 

 business-like skill and parsimony. Bullets were 

 carefully cut out of the carcass for future use, and 

 a sufficient number of skins having been prepared, 

 the waggons were loaded up and slowly driven down 

 country to the coast. 



From the point of view of the naturalist, the 

 final disappearance of the true quagga is a fact full of 



