402 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



of beautiful birds, and thus the inception of a new feminine 

 fashion often meant and means an extensive avian massacre in 

 tropical forests. Unhappy animated nature might be said to 

 shiver as man progressed ; science has often been unable to 

 preserve the remains of an exterminated species in a glass case. 

 The prosperous tradesman who has achieved wealth in the sale 

 or manufacture of the bodies of one class of animals has often, by 

 these means, enabled his progeny to become wholesale slayers of 

 others for pleasure ; thus sport succeeds business, and soon rarity 

 precedes extinction. The wealthy orchid grower so dearly loves his 

 plants that his travelling agent not seldom depopulates the area 

 of a local species to satisfy the housing capacities of glass 

 structures at home. If a bird or insect has unfortunately sunk 

 to the condition of rarity in its native haunts, or has become an 

 endemic species, its complete decay is at once accelerated by the 

 eagerness of naturalists to obtain specimens before it is too late. 

 The names of new heroes will in the future be known to sport ; 

 the man who shot the last Lion* will follow an earlier record of 

 the fortunate who slew the last "White Khinoceros.t The name 

 of the executioner of the last of the Elephants should not be 

 forgotten in the coming days when the world may be a vast shop 

 under the direction of a body of eminent financiers. 



The Beaver, exterminated in some of its former haunts, now 

 lives on, it may be said, by a change of fashion. The case has 

 been clearly stated by Marsh. When a Parisian manufacturer 

 invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal 

 use, the demand for Beaver's fur fell off, and this animal, whose 

 habits prove an important agency in the formation of bogs and 

 other modifications of forest nature, immediately began to in- 

 crease, reappeared in haunts which it had long abandoned, and 

 can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate 



* " Africa is the only portion of the globe where the Lion remains lord 

 of the forest, as the king of beasts. The question has frequently been dis- 

 cussed, ' Why should the Lion have vanished from the scene where in ancient 

 days he reigned in all his glory ? ' The answer is simple — the Lions have 

 been exterminated." — Sir S. Baker, ' Wild Beasts and their Ways,' vol. i. 

 p. 307. 



f The late Mr. J. H. Gurney writes : — " I have seen the man who 

 exterminated the Nestor productus from Philip Island, he having shot the 

 last of that species left on the island' (' Zoologist,' 1854, p. 4298). 



