OSBORN AND ANTHONY — CLOSE OF AGE OF MAMMALS 235 
gent preservation and public appreciation. It would be only a partial remedy to 
establish preserves unless we know more about the habits of the mammals which 
we hope to protect in these preserves, and it is highly essential that more attention 
be paid to this intimate detailed knowledge of life history and ecology of our 
mammalian fauna. It is this aspect of natural history that has the greatest 
popular appeal and is most intimately related to economic problems. 
He believed that men are coming to realize more and more the threatening 
features of the destruction of mammal life. There seems to be a feeling that 
opposition to this destruction is almost hopeless ; that there is no use trying to 
stem the tide. While Doctor Adams granted that the problem is sufficiently 
discouraging, he regarded it in the same light as he did the question of our liberty, 
in the best sense of the term. Our liberty or our opportunities for living is a thing 
to be protected at any price, and the struggle for its protection must not be 
relinquished at any time. We cannot save wild life unless we go about it with the 
same earnestness and with the same refusal to acknowledge defeat that we would 
employ in the protection and conservation of our libert 3 ^ It is a similar unending 
process of adjustment to our conditions of life. 
The discussion was brought to a close by the comments of Dr. E. W. Nelson, 
chief of the Biological Survey of the United States Department of Agriculture, 
charged with the Federal activities in relation to game and other mammal life. 
Doctor Nelson stated that the Biological Survey is engaged largely in the work 
of conservation and he has been more and more impressed, especially during 
the last few years, with the difficulties, and in some instances the apparently 
insurmountable difficulties, in the way of saving any considerable share of the 
existing large mammals of the world. 
The rapid progress of modern civilization of man has accelerated the downhill 
procession of the other important mammals . Primitive man was simply one of the 
various predatory animals which preyed upon the coexistent animal life. At 
that stage man, like other mammals, was subject to thevicissitudesofhisenviron- 
ment. Diseases or severe drouths or other inclement climatic conditions and 
other causes which destroyed wild life in general also destroyed a similar propor- 
tion of primitive man, thus retaining a balance in numbers which prevented the 
extermination of the animal life on which man preyed. 
With the acceleration of modern civilization the powers of man to exterminate 
the wild life about him have increased marvelously, with the modern improvement 
of weapons and means of locomotion, which have been accom.panied b 3 i' the taking 
over of enormous areas of forests and plains for agricultural purposes. This has 
been accompanied by rapidly increasing populations and with an amazing increase 
in the number of hunters which go afield each year making a total annual bag of 
extraordinary proportions. 
As a result of an inquiry of the state game wardens throughout the country it 
appears that in 1921 hunting licenses were issued to more than 4,000,000 hunters, 
while in many states landowners may hunt without a license. This with the num- 
ber hunting in a few states which do not require licenses will undoubtedly increase 
the number of hunters who went afield in that year to exceed 6,000,000. The fact 
that any game survives after the hunting season in which such an army goes forth 
to shoot is amazing. 
JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY, VOL. 3 , NO. 4 
