ORIGIN OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO. 
139 
Every ivory billiard ball in use in the world is said to have cost 
the life of a human being. And still the demand for ivory, not only 
for the manufacture of these simple spheres for a popular game, 
but for a multitude of other uses in decorative and toilet articles, 
continues, with the price so high that the trade still goes on in spite 
of its disastrous cost in human life. 
Most of the heavy expense has been paid in the jungles of 
Central Africa, where a man does not count for half as much as a 
humped ox or a trained ape. For nature has built an effectual bar¬ 
rier about her cultivators of billiard balls—the elephants—and he 
who would penetrate it must take his life in his hands. 
In the first place she has provided an atmosphere of great heat, 
reeking half the year with moisture, in which lurk the germs of a 
hundred unnamed diseases, and rent for two seasons with sudden 
storms accompanied by heavy rains. Then there is the barrier of 
a rank and tangled vegetation, through which no roads but those 
of the jungle-folk have yet pierced. 
IVORY, HOW OBTAINED AND USED. 
The huge trees conceal fierce wild animals, poisonous snakes, 
and inlets whose stings mean death at the end of the days of suffer¬ 
ing. Impassable morasses, lakes, broad rivers and mountain ranges 
are also numerous, and yet more dangerous are the jealous savages, 
who have learned enough of civilization to distrust it, and who 
know that a man never protests against robbery after he is dead. 
So the elephant is given a chance to grow a little before the 
harvesters of the ivory crop can reach him. When he has trump¬ 
eted for a few score of years, and his tusks have made him a power 
in the herd, some native hunter spies him as he thrashes through 
the jungle or wades in a morass. 
Then a great number of the harvest warriors gather and build 
a huge inclosure of vines, into which the elephant one day walks. 
From the surrounding trees come a shower of arrows, and perhaps 
a bullet or two from an ancient gun obtained at a hundred times 
its value from some wandering trader. 
The elephant charges about trumpeting, but on every side the 
