THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
outside the continent of Africa in which wild animals were still really 
plentiful. 
Up to the early years of the last century, however, Africa still slumbered 
on, and remained much in the same condition in which it had been for 
countless ages past. Save around the coastal fringe, no people of European 
race had until that time anywhere made good their footing in the country, 
and the great dark heart of the continent had remained a sanctuary, 
undisturbed except by wild men armed with archaic weapons, for countless 
hosts of wild creatures, representing a fauna unsurpassed in the richness 
of its variety or the numbers of its individuals by any that has ever existed 
on this planet. 
But how does the matter stand to-day, after the last hundred years of 
European enterprise in Africa and the arming of hordes of African natives 
with the weapons of the white man ? 
What has happened in that comparatively short space of time is indeed 
lamentable, and a sorry tale to tell to all lovers of nature and its wild 
creatures. 
In the south all the great herds of antelopes and other animals, which 
less than seventy years ago still thronged the plains of the Cape Colony, 
the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, are gone, save for a very small 
remnant now preserved on enclosed farms. Gone, too, are the great white 
rhinoceroses and the major portion of all the noble game animals once so 
extraordinarily abundant in all the countries lying between the Limpopo 
and the Zambesi. 
European settlement and the acquisition of fire-arms by the native 
tribes are the two causes which have been responsible for the extermina- 
tion of the game over wide areas in Southern Africa. Yet, in spite of much 
persecution and the terrible visitation of rinderpest which swept through 
the country some few years ago, large game still survives in considerable 
numbers in certain districts to the south of the Zambesi, and in the 
semi-desert tracts which extend north-westward from the Bechuanaland 
Protectorate to Angola. 
In North-Eastern Africa vast areas of country which not long ago teemed 
with game have been almost denuded of all wild creatures by the Abys- 
sinians and the Somali tribesmen, who are now very generally armed with 
modern rifles, and who are at the same time subject to no restraint in the 
matter of hunting and killing game. 
In certain other parts of the continent, too, such as Portuguese East and 
2 FfelPl 
