BRITISH ASSOCIATION; ZOOLOGICAL SECTION. BD0 
It would be futile to discuss in detail the precise agencies by which 
the destruction of animal life is wrought, or the pretexts or excuses 
for them. The most potent factors are the perfection of the modern 
firearm and the enormous increase in its use by civilised and 
barbarous man. Sometimes the pretext is sport, sometimes wanton 
destructiveness rules. The extermination of beasts of prey, the 
clearing of soil for stock or crops, the securing of meat, the com- 
mercial pursuit of hides and horns, and of furs and feathers, all play 
their part. Farmers and settlers on the outskirts of civilisation 
accuse the natives, and allege that the problem would be solved were 
no firearms allowed to any but themselves. Sportsmen accuse other 
sportsmen, whom they declare to be no real sportsmen, and every 
person whose object is not sport. The great museums, in the name 
of science, and the rich amateur collectors press forward to secure the 
last specimens of moribund species. 
But even apart from such deliberate and conscious agencies, the 
near presence of man is inhospitable to wild life. As he spreads over 
the earth, animals wither before him, driven from their haunts, 
deprived of their food, perishing from new diseases. It is part of a 
general biological process, From time to time, in the past history of 
the world, a species, favoured by some happy kink of structure or 
fortunate accident of adaptability, has become dominant. It has in- 
creased greatly in numbers, outrunning its natal bounds, and has 
radiated in every possible direction, conquering woodland and prairies, 
the hills and the plains, transcending barriers that had seemed im- 
passable, and perhaps itself breaking up into new local races and 
varieties. It must be long since such a triumphant progress was 
unattended by death and destruction. When the first terrestrial 
animals crept out of their marshes into the clean air of the dry land, 
they had only plants and the avenging pressure of physical forces to 
overcome. But when the Amphibians were beaten by the Reptiles, 
and when from amongst the Reptiles some insignificant species 
acquired the prodigious possibility of transformation to Mammals, 
and still more when amongst the Mammals Eutherian succeeded 
Marsupial, Carnivore the Creodont, and Man the Ape, it could have 
been only after a fatal contest that the newcomers triumphed. The 
struggle, we must suppose, was at first most acute between animals 
and their nearest inferior allies, as similarity of needs brings about 
the keenest competition, but it must afterwards have been extended 
against lower and lower occupants of the coveted territory. 
The human race has for long been the dominant terrestrial species, 
and man has a wider capacity for adaptation to different environ- 
ments, and an infinitely greater power of transcending geographical 
barriers than have been enjoyed by any other set of animals. For a 
considerable time many of the more primitive tribes, especially before 
the advent of firearms, had settled down into a kind of natural equi- 
librium with the local mammalian fauna, but these tribes have been 
first driven to a keener competition with the lower animals, and then, 
in most parts of the world, have themselves been forced almost or 
completely out of existence. The resourceful and aggressive higher 
