sh by hundreds through starvation.
(H. Hesketh Prichard.)

* * * * *

MEXICO

About ten years more will see the extinction of the mountain sheep of
Lower California,--in the wake of the recently exterminated Mexican
sheep of the Santa Maria Lakes region. In 1908, I solemnly warned the
government of President Diaz, and at that time the Mexican government
expressed much concern.

It is a great pity that just now political conditions are completely
estopping wild-life protection in Mexico; but it is true. If the code of
proposed laws that I drew up (by request) in 1908 and submitted to
Minister Molina were adopted, it would have a good effect on the fauna
of Mexico.

In Mexico there is little hoofed game to kill,--deer of the white-tail
groups, seven or eight species; the desert mule deer; the brocket; the
prong-horned antelope, the mountain sheep and the peccary. The deer will
not so easily be exterminated, but the antelope and sheep will be
utterly destroyed. They will be the first to go; and I think they can
not by any possibility last longer than ten years. Is it not too bad
that Mexico should permit her finest species of hoofed and horned game
to be obliterated before she awakens to the desirability of
conservation! The Mexicans could protect their small stock of big game
if they would; but in Lower California they are leasing huge tracts of
land to cattle companies, and they permit the lessees to kill all the
wild game they please on their leased lands, even with the aid of dogs.
This is a vicious and fatal system, and contrary to all the laws of
nations.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII

PRESENT AND FUTURE OF NORTH AMERICAN BIG GAME

(Concluded)

THE WHITE-TAILED DEER.--Five hundred years hence, when the greed and
rapacity of "civilized" man has completed the loot and ruin of the
continent of North America, the white-tailed deer will be the last
species of our big game to be exterminated. Its mental traits, its size,
its color and its habits all combine to render it the most persistent of
our large animals, and the best fitted to survive. It neither bawls nor
bugles to attract its enemies, it can not be called to a sportsman, like
the moose, and it sticks to its timber with rare and commendable
closeness. When it sees a strange living thing walking erect, it does
not stop to stare and catch soft-nosed bullets, but dashes away in quest
of