he land, as well as by actively hunting and killing
it, made an end of the great wild ox of Europe, the aurochs or urus of
Caesar, the last of which was killed near Warsaw in 1627. He similarly
destroyed the bison, first in Europe and then (in our own days) in
North America. A few hundred, carefully guarded, are all that remain
in the two continents. He has very nearly made an end of the elk in
Europe, and will soon do so completely in America. The wolf and the
beaver were destroyed in these British Islands about 400 years ago.
They are rapidly disappearing from France, and will soon be
exterminated in Scandinavia and Russia and in Canada. At a remote
prehistoric period the bear was exterminated by man in Britain and the
lion driven from the whole of Europe, except Macedonia, where it still
flourished in the days of the ancient Greeks. It was common in Asia
Minor a few centuries ago. The giraffe and the elephant have departed
from South Africa before the encroachments of civilised man. The day
is not distant when they will cease to exist in the wild state in any
part of Africa, and with them are vanishing many splendid antelopes.
Even our "nearest and dearest" relatives in the animal world, the
gorilla, the chimpanzee and the ourang, are doomed. Now that man has
learnt to defy malaria and other fevers the tropical forest will be
occupied by the greedy civilised horde of humanity, and there will be
no room for the most interesting and wonderful of all animals, the
man-like apes, unless (as we may hope in their case, at any rate) such
living monuments of human history are made sacred and treated with
greater care than are our ancient monuments in stone. Smaller
creatures, birds like the dodo and the great auk and a whole troop of
others less familiar, have disappeared and are disappearing under the
human blight. Even some beautiful insects--the great copper butterfly
and the swallow-tail butterfly--have been exterminated in England by
human "progress" in the shape of the drainage of the Fen country.

But the most repulsive of the destructive results of human expansion
is the poisoning of rivers, and the consequent extinction in them of
fish and of well-nigh every living thing, save mould and putrefactive
bacteria. In the Thames it will soon be a hundred years since man, by
his filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and murdered the
innocents of the eel-fare. Even at its foulest time, however, the
Thames mud was