AFRICAN GAME 
INTRODUCTION 
F ROM very ancient times Africa has been known to the more 
civilized races of the world as pre-eminently the home of strange 
and wonderful forms of life. It was in the dark recesses of the 
eastern portions of this vast continent that the elephants were 
slain, the ivory from whose tusks was used in the decoration of 
King Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem; whilst the existence of 
great man -like apes in Western Africa was first discovered by Carthaginian 
navigators, though whether the strange creatures seen by Hanno and his 
companions were gorillas, or chimpanzees, or only great dog-faced 
baboons, can never now be ascertained. 
In later Roman times the lions, rhinoceroses and other wonderful 
animals which were shown in the great amphitheatre of the Coliseum 
were all brought from Africa, as also, it is supposed, were the elephants 
used by the Carthaginians in the Punic wars. There is, however, con- 
siderable doubt on this point, many authorities maintaining that the 
elephants used by the Carthaginians in their wars with the Romans had 
been brought overland from India, in which country these highly intelligent 
animals had long been trained to the service of man. 
But, although in ancient times, as far as was known to the geographers 
and explorers of those early days, Africa surpassed all other known regions 
of the world in the wealth and variety of its fauna, still, at the same period 
of the world’s history, many parts of Europe and Asia, as well as of the 
still undiscovered continent of America, were also exceedingly rich in 
wild animal life. But as the inhabitants of Asia and Europe increased in 
numbers and became more civilized, they gradually brought large areas 
of those continents under cultivation, and so reduced the range of the 
wild game. 
Then America was discovered, and Europeans gradually spread right 
across that continent and penetrated into many other regions of the earth; 
and everywhere before their advance, the wild creatures of the forests and 
the plains, as well as of oceanic islands, and even of the open seas, melted 
away as at the breath of a pestilence, till at length few countries remained 
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