with tusks weighing less than thirty pounds 
apiece. This renders safe almost all the 
females and an ample supply of breeding 
males. Too much praise cannot be given the 
governments and the individuals who have 
brought about this happy result. It would 
be a veritable and most tragic calamity if 
the lordly elephant, the giant among exist¬ 
ing four-footed creatures, should be per¬ 
mitted to vanish from the face of the earth. 
But of course protection is not perma¬ 
nently possible over the greater part of the 
country, which is well fitted for settlement; 
nor anywhere, if the herds grow too numer¬ 
ous. It would be not merely silly, but 
worse than silly, to try to stop all killing of 
elephants. The unchecked increase of any 
big and formidable wild beast, even though 
not a flesh eater, is incompatible with the 
existence of man when he has emerged 
from the stage of lowest savagery. This is 
not a matter of theory, but of proved fact. 
In place after place in Africa where pro¬ 
tection has been extended to hippopotamus 
or buffalo, rhinoceros or elephant, it has 
658 
been found necessary to withdraw it be¬ 
cause the protected animals did such dam¬ 
age to property, or became such menaces to 
human life. Among all four species cows 
with calves often attack men without prov¬ 
ocation, and old bulls are at any time likely 
to become infected by a spirit of wanton and 
ferocious mischief and apt to become man 
killers. I know settlers who tried to pre¬ 
serve the rhinoceros which they found living 
on their big farms, and who were obliged 
to abandon the attempt, and themselves to 
kill the rhinos because of repeated and wan¬ 
ton attacks on human beings by the latter. 
Where we were by Neri, a year or two be¬ 
fore our visit, the rhinos had become so 
dangerous, killing one white man and sev¬ 
eral natives, that the District Commissioner 
who preceded Mr. Browne was forced to 
undertake a crusade against them, killing 
fifteen. Both in South Africa and on the 
Nile protection extended to hippopotamus 
has in places been wholly withdrawn be¬ 
cause of the damage done by the beasts to 
the crops of the natives, or because of their 
