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EDITOBIAL GLEANINGS. 



NATUEE EESEEVES. 

 FORMATION OF A NEW SOCIETY. 



In his recent address to the Zoological Section of the British 

 Association at Dundee, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell made a strong appeal 

 for the organized preservation of the world's fauna. "It is only by 

 the deliberate and conscious interference of man," he said, " that the 

 evil wrought by man has been arrested"; and, again, "Each 

 generation is the guardian of the existing resources of the world ; it 

 has come into a great inheritance, but only as a trustee " — a trustee, 

 that is to say, for generations that are to be. That the larger wild 

 creatures are steadily disappearing from the face of the earth with 

 the advance of civilization needs little demonstration. But coinci- 

 dently with the wholesale extermination of mammals there is in 

 progress a no less disastrous process of destruction among the lesser 

 creatures — birds, fishes, reptiles, insects, and plants — also of geo- 

 logical remains, and in almost every case this is the result of " the 

 deliberate and conscious interference of man." 



To arrest this destructive tendency serious consideration is being 

 given to the subject in many countries. There exist in the United 

 States "reserves" for the vanishing human races; in Norway, 

 Sweden, and North Eussia, the Lapps are efficiently protected ; in 

 Africa and New Zealand, as elsewhere in the British Dominions 

 beyond the seas, large tracts of land have been fenced off, and laws 

 enacted to prevent the traffic in alcohol and other goods harmful to 

 the primitive races. 



The Society for the Promotion of Nature Eeserves. 

 Elsewhere the duty of maintaining particular phases of human 

 life and of preserving natural objects is recognized and performed by 

 the community as a whole, acting through the State ; but in the 

 United Kingdom it has been left to private enterprise and private 

 munificence to establish and finance such refuges and nature reserves 

 as we actually possess. Something has been attempted, it is true, 

 to check the wanton destruction of animal life, by various Acts of 

 Parliament, the arrangement of "close" seasons, sanctuaries, &c, 



