ook and by crook the
natives secure plenty of modern firearms,--there are places in the Far
East that we know will contain big game forever and a day. Take the
Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra as examples.

Mr. C. William Beebe, who recently has visited the Far East, has
described how the state of Selangor, between Malacca and Penang, has
taken on many airs of improvement since 1878, and sections of Sarawak
Territory are being cut down and burned for the growing of rubber.
Despite this I am trying to think that those developments menace the
total volume of the wild life of those regions but little. I wonder if
those tangled, illimitable, ever-renewing jungles yet know that their
faces have been scratched. White men never will exterminate the big game
of the really dense jungles of the eastern tropics; but with enough
axes, snares, guns and cartridges _the natives_ may be able to
accomplish it!

In Malayana there are some jungles so dense, so tangled with lianas and
so thorny with Livistonias and rattan that nothing larger than a cat can
make way through them. There are thousands of square miles so boggy, so
swampy, so dark, gloomy and mosquito-ridden that all men fear them and
avoid them, and in them rubber culture must be impossible. In those
silent places the gaur, the rhino, the Malay sambar, the clouded leopard
and the orang-utan surely are measurably safe from the game-bags and
market gunners of the shooting world. It is good to think that there is
an equatorial belt of jungle clear around the world, in Central and
South America as well as in the old World, in which there will be little
extermination in our day, except of birds for the feather market. But
the open plains, open mountains, and open forests of Asia and
Australasia are in different case. Eventually they will be "shot out."

China, all save Yunnan and western Mongolia, is now horribly barren of
wild life. Can it ever be brought back? We think it can not. The
millions of population are too many; and except in the great forest
tracts, the spread of modern firearms will make an end of the game.
Already the pheasants are being swept out of China for the London
market, and extinction is staring several species in the face. On the
whole, the pheasants of the Old World are being hit hard by the
rubber-planting craze. Mr. Beebe declares that owing to the inrush of
aggressive capital, the haunts of many species of pheasants are being
denuded of all their n