t division, privately bred.

* * * * *

The above showing of the pitifully small numbers of the specimens that
constitute the remnant of the big-game of the Cape suggest just one
thing:--a universal close season throughout Cape Colony, and no hunting
whatever for ten years. And yet, what do we see?

The Report from which the above census was taken contains half a column
of solid matter, in small type, giving a list of the _open seasons_ all
over Cape Colony, during which killing may be done! So it seems that the
spirit of slaughter is the same in Africa that it is in
America,--_kill_, as long as there is _anything_ alive to kill!

This list is of startling interest, because it shows how closely the
small remnants of big game are now marked down in South Africa.

In view of the success with which Englishmen protect their game when
once they have made up their minds to do so, it is fair to expect that
the herds now under protection, as listed above, will save their
respective species from extinction. It is alarming, however, to note the
wide territory covered by the deadly "open seasons," and to wonder when
the bars really will be put up.

To-day, Mashonaland is a very-much-settled colony. The Cape to Cairo
railway and trains de luxe long ago attained the Palls of the Zambesi,
and now the Curator of the Salisbury Museum will have to search
diligently in far off Nyassaland, and beyond the Zambesi River, to find
enough specimens to fill his cases with representatives of the vanished
Rhodesian fauna. Once (1892) the white rhinoceros was found in northern
Rhodesia; but never again. In Salisbury, elands and zebras are nearly as
great a curiosity as they are in St. Louis.

But for the discovery of white rhinoceroses in the Lado district, on the
western bank of the Nile below Gondokoro, we would now be saying that
_Rhinoceros simus_ is within about ten specimens of total extinction.

From South Africa, as far up as Salisbury, in central Rhodesia, at least
99 per cent of the big game has disappeared before the white man's
rifle. Let him who doubts this scan the census of wild animals still
living in Cape Colony.

From all the other regions of Africa that are easily accessible to
gunners, the animal life is vigorously being shot out, and no man in his
senses will now say that the big game is breeding faster than it is
being killed. The reverse is painfully true. Mr. Carl Akeley, in his