414 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



to the greed of collectors, for a professional collector told me 

 that the larvae were so abundant five-and-twenty years ago (this 

 was written in 1896) that it paid him to give up his ordinary 

 work in order to collect all he could find, as he received from a 

 London dealer about eighteenpence a dozen for them. This 

 man alone collected some thousands every j^ear."* "In Victoria 

 (Australia) the days of the Lyre-bird (Menura victoria) are 

 numbered, unless it develop the habit of nesting in trees or spots 

 inaccessible to its far more dangerous enemy — an introduced one 

 — the European Fox."t 



The extermination of man by man, the extinction of aboriginal 

 races by more progressive peoples, is a story well known to 

 anthropologists, and requires separate detail. Wild nature must 

 have ever regarded the genus Homo as its deadliest foe. 



Even the American trees have suffered by vandal hands. 

 Miss S. Fenimore Cooper tells us : — " At a particular point in 

 the wilds of Oregon, near the bank of the Columbia Eiver, there 

 stood a single tree of great size — one of the majestic pines of that 

 region, and long known as a landmark to the hunters and 

 emigrants passing over those solitary wastes. The members of an 

 expedition sent out to explore that country by the Government, 

 arriving near the point, were on the watch for that pine to guide 

 their course ; they looked for it some time, but in vain. At 

 length, reaching the spot where they supposed it ought to have 

 stood — a way -mark in the wilderness — they found the tree lying 

 on the earth. It had been felled and there left to rot by some 

 man, claiming, no doubt, to be a civilized being." I In Australia 

 the big gum-trees near the township of Fernshaw, some fifty 

 miles north of Melbourne, in size completely eclipse the Californian 

 Wellingtonias, but are being rapidly exterminated. " The land 

 they grow on is good land, with twenty or more feet of vegetable 

 soil in many spots, and it is wanted ; and so the gums are given 

 as victims to the axe and the firebrand." § 



* ' British Moths,' p. 86. 



f Kitson, ' The Emu,' v. p. 58. Cf. direct persecution by man (ante. 

 p. 409). 



I ' Journ. Naturalist in United States,' vol. i. p. 255 (1855). 



Ward, ' Rambles of an Australian Naturalist ' (edited by P. Fountain), 

 p. 86. 



