Remarks on the South African Game Laws and the 

 Preservation of Game. 



Anyone perusing the very numerous enactments referring to 

 the preservation of the different sorts of game of the Cape 

 Colony itself, might be led to suppose that many species of the 

 larger antelope still remained there, or at least in tolerably fair 

 numbers, and only required special and stringent laws for their 

 safe protection. It is scarcely worth arguing whether these enact- 

 ments proved inoperative or were framed too late in the day to 

 have a salutary effect. However, we cannot now be blind to the 

 fact — and it is sad for those who take an interest in such an im- 

 portant subject to relate — that, with the exception of a few wild 

 Elephants and perhaps Buffalo, which still eke out a harried exist- 

 ence, although protected in the Colonial Governments' forests, and 

 also an odd troop of Zebras, Koodoos, and probably Hartebeest, 

 which serve as ornaments in a semi-domesticated condition on 

 some of the out-of-the-way farms, the remnant of the noble game 

 which once roamed in countless thousands all over the country, and 

 for which Southern Africa was pre-eminently renowned, has been by 

 wanton and ruthless slaughter decimated or driven far beyond the 

 outermost boundaries of civilisation into the pathless veldt of the 

 Kalahari, or the inhospitable territories of the aborigines of the 

 Interior. 



Protected by the difSculty of access to these solitudes, the Giraife, 

 Eland, and other varieties of the most beautiful and interesting 

 animals in the world, multiplied rapidly and feared no inside foe 

 except the inevitable assaults of wild beasts, the occasional bullet 

 from the passing traveller and trader in search of the necessary 

 supply of fresh meat, the insidious pitfall or easily avoided attack 

 from the natives on foot, armed only with the assegai or loud 

 resounding but little effective " babyjan bow," which is a kind of 

 converted Queen Anne. Notwithstanding the rapid advance of 

 civilisation northward, the colonisation of British Bechuanaland, 

 and the opening up within the past few years of large portions of 



