THE VANISHING AFRICAN FAUNA in 
Cow Lake, a small lagoon near Durban, on account of the 
damage they did in the sugar-cane plantations. The few that 
still remain in Zululand are all that are left in British South 
Africa. Rhinoceroses, too, are becoming scarce, and the white, 
or square-mouthed, form is practically extinct. In 1886 fifteen 
were killed, and in the following year Selous saw the tracks of 
two or three. Writing in 1893, that famous hunter said that, 
twenty years before, it was a common animal over an enormous 
extent of country in Central South Africa. In the same year 
Mr. Coryndon obtained two specimens, one of which went to 
the British Museum (Natural History) and the other to Mr. 
Walter Rothschild’s INIuseum at Tring. 
There is a sad tale to tell about the antelopes. Cornwallis 
Harris hunted in South Africa late in the “ thirties,” and, de- 
scribing the game on a tract near the Vaal River, in the Orange 
Free State, he says: — “The number of wild animals on this 
swampy flat almost realised fable, the roads made by their 
incessant tramp resembling so many well-travelled highways. 
At every step incredible herds of bontebucks, blesbucks, and 
springbucks, with troops of gnus and squadrons of the common 
or stripeless quagga, were performing their complicated evolu- 
tions ; and not infrequently a knot of ostriches, decked in their 
white plumes, played the part of General Officer and Staff with 
such strict propriety as further to remind the spectator of a 
cavalry review.” The blesbuck is now so scarce that it can be 
hardly reckoned a beast of chase ; and Mr. Bryden says that 
the scant remnants of the once innumerable herds are living 
on a few farms in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, 
under the care of Boer farmers. The experiment is an ex- 
tremely interesting one — and others of the same kind are being 
carried on. Mr. Bryden points out that within the next few 
years we shall know whether this antelope is to be rescued from 
utter extinction or is doomed to vanish miserably from the face 
of the earth. The bontebuck is, perhaps, worse off as regards 
numbers ; for there remains but a single herd, living, strictly 
preserved, in the south of Gape Colony. The numbers of the 
springbuck have, indeed, diminished, but it may still be said 
to be fairly abundant in South Africa, thanks to the protection 
afforded it in Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, and the 
Transvaal. White-tailed gnus are rapidly reaching vanishing 
point, though one writer on popular natural history recently 
declared in print that “ they wander about in herds of from 
eight or ten to forty,” and that “ hunters find out their lairs 
and shoot them in order to eat their flesh, which is dried and 
made into what the Boers call biltong.” Nevertheless, it is 
safer to accept the account given of this antelope by Mr. Bryden 
that it is probably extinct in a wild condition, but preserved in 
the Orange Free State, where some six or seven hundred head 
are living on the lands of Dutch farmers. The true hartebeest 
is practically exterminated in the Orange Free State and in the 
