BRITISH ASSOCIATION: ZOOLOGICAL SHCTION. 357 
of the huge and pathless areas of the Dark Continent, and assured 
that lions and leopards, elephants and giraffe, still exist in countless 
numbers, nor do I forget the dim recesses of the tropical forests 
where creatures still lurk of which we have only the vaguest rumour. 
But we know that South Africa, less than fifty years ago, was a 
dream that surpassed the imagination of the most ardent hunter. 
And we know what it is now. It is traversed by railways, it has 
been rolled over by the devastations of war. The game that once 
covered the land in unnumbered millions is now either extinct, like 
the quagga and the black wildebeeste, or its scanty remnant lingers 
in a few reserves and ona few farms. The sportsman and the hunter 
have been driven to other parts of the continent, and I have no con- 
fidence in the future of the African fauna. The Mountains of the 
Moon are within range of a long vacation holiday. Civilisation is 
eating into the land from every side. All the great Huropean coun- 
tries are developing their African possessions. There are exploring 
expeditions, punitive expeditions, shooting and collecting expeditions. 
Railways are being pushed inland, water-routes opened up. The land 
is being patrolled and policed and taxed, and the wild animals are 
suffering. Let us go back for a moment to the Transvaal and con- 
sider what has happened since the Rand was opened, neglecting the 
reserves. Lions are nearly extinct. The hyzna has been trapped 
and shot and poisoned out of existence. The eland is extinct. The 
giraffe is extinct. The elephant is extinct. The rhinoceros is ex- 
tinct. The buffalo isextinct. The bontebok, the red hartebeeste, the 
mountain zebra, the oribi, and the grysbok are so rare as to be practi- 
cally extinct. And the same fate may at any time overtake the rest 
of Africa. The white man has learned to live in the tropics; he is 
mastering tropical diseases; he has need of the vegetable and mineral 
wealth that he awaiting him, and although there is yet time to save 
the African fauna, it is in imminent peril. 
When we turn to Australia, with its fauna of unique zoological 
interest, we come to a more advanced case of the same disease. In 
1909 Mr. G. C. Shortridge, a very skilled collector, working for the 
British Museum, published in the ‘ Proceedings of the Zoological 
Society of London’ the results of an investigation he had carried out 
on the fauna of Western Australia south of the tropics during the 
years 1904-1907. He gave a map showing the present and compara- 
tively recent distribution for each of the species of Marsupials and 
Monotremes indigenous to that locality. West Australia as yet has 
been very much less affected by civilisation than Queensland, New 
South Wales, or Victoria, and yet in practically every case there was 
found evidence of an enormous recent restriction of the range of the 
species. Marsupials and Monotremes are, as you know, rather stupid 
animals, with small powers of adaptation to new conditions, and 
they are in the very gravest danger of complete extinction. In the 
island of Tasmania the thylacine, or marsupial wolf, and the Tasmanian 
devil have unfortunately incurred the just hostility of the stock raiser 
and poultry farmer, and the date of their final extermination is 
puerencChing at a pace that must be reckoned by months rather than 
by years. 
