EXTERMINATION IN ANIMAL LIFE. 403 



danger of extirpation.* So small an insect as the gnat is, as 

 pointed out by Mr. E. A. Butler, for its existence not independent 

 of the action of man. In the evil days, when every house had 

 its water-butt, and when stagnant ponds abounded on every side, 

 often in close proximity to human dwellings, the conditions were 

 so much the more favourable for the multiplication of gnats, 

 and wherever such conditions now exist, the insects are liable to 

 be both numerous and troublesome. But the extensive abolition 

 of water-butts, the introduction of closed and indoor cisterns, 

 and better land drainage have all tended to reduce the number 

 of Culicidce in this country, whatever may be the case elsewhere, t 

 Small White Herons or Egrets are destroyed during the season 

 in which they have their nests and young, in order to supply 

 plumes for ladies' hats. A better feeling having been aroused 

 even in female devotees to fashion, the shopkeepers found it 

 advisable to state that these plumes were then artificially made. 

 The late Sir William Flower found that these plumes consisted 

 of genuine feathers, and protested : " One of the most beautiful 

 of birds is being swept off the face of the earth under circum- 

 stances of peculiar cruelty, to minister to a passing fashion, 

 bolstered up by a glaring falsehood."! 



If a sportsman visits South Africa for the first time, and has 

 alone read the accounts of the game given by authors who wrote 

 as recently as thirty or forty years ago, he will think he has been 

 conveyed to the wrong continent. In many parts which then 

 swarmed with game he will now find as many buck as he would 

 meet with on a Surrey plateau, which some high veld so much 

 resembles. Sandeman, travelling in 1878, bears witness to the 

 charnel-house that then existed : — " While the waggons kept to 

 the now well-worn track towards Heidelberg, A. and I took a wide 

 tour of the veld in search of bok, but, although we came across 



* ' Man and Nature,' p. 84. 



f ' Our Household Insects,' p. 234. — On the other hand, the destructive 

 influence of these insects on man is detailed in a recent book reviewed in 

 these pages (ante, p. 393), ' Malaria ; a Neglected Factor in the History of 

 Greece and Eome.' 



X ' Nature,' liv. p. 204.— Cf. 'The Emu,' vii. p. 71, where Mr. Matting- 

 ley, under the title of " Plundered for their Plumes," records the destruction 

 — " shot off their nests " — of the Australian Egrets, Mesophoyx plumifera and 

 Herodias timoriensis. 



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