undue persecution has become comparatively very rare. I refer to the Arctic Right Whale, which, but for the protection afforded it by its extreme northern habitat, would long ago have been exterminated. As it is, the greatest hope of the species lingering on is that it may from its scarcity not pay for the heavy outlay incurred in its pursuit; but although we have not actually lost the Arctic. Right Whale as a species, it is to be feared that a smaller whalebone whale, the Atlantic Right Whale, which formerly frequented the temperate regions of the Atlantic and North Sea, has now ceased to exist. Of this creature, once finding employment for so many hardy seamen from the Biscayan ports, the only remains known to exist are the cervical vertebra, dredged up off Lyme Regis, now in the British Museum, and the skeleton of a young one which was killed in the harbour of St. Sebastian in 1854, and is now in the Copenhagen Museum. The mother was with the young one but effected her escape. Unless the whale taken in the Mediterranean near Taranto, in 1877, belonged to this species, that taken at St. Sebastian is the only specimen which has come under the notice of a naturalist, and the species may almost be said to have been lost before it was known to exist.

So little, however, do we know of the inhabitants of the trackless ocean that it behoves us to speak with extreme caution for even great herds of a supposed extinct species may be roaming its depths unsuspected, till accident brings them to our notice. Such an instance occurred in November 1861, when there entered the Bay of Kiel a large shoal of Dolphins, of a species known to science only by an imperfect skeleton, found in a sub-fossil condition beneath the peat in a Lincolnshire fen. Thirty of them were separated from the shoal, but only one was captured; this, however, was quite sufficient to identify the species with the form already described by Owen under the name of Phocæna crassidens from the Lincolnshire remains. In the following summer three other individuals, presumably from the same shoal, were thrown ashore on the north-west coast of Zealand. But for the accident of the entanglement of this herd of great beasts (varying from 16 to 19 feet in length) in the shoals, from

which few of them in all probability lived to extricate themselves, who would have dreamed of the survival in the present day of this Dolphin, "come back as it were from the dead"?

One more northern animal deserves a passing notice here, because of its rapidly decreasing numbers. The Walrus has been the object of unceasing persecution, and has been driven from one locality to another till it is now rarely found so far south as 60° north latitude. Vast herds of these animals formerly existed in the Arctic seas, but wherever met with it was an object of ruthless persecution, and but from its present strongholds being always difficult, sometimes impossible of approach, it would doubtless long ere this have become extinct. A like fate, although perhaps more distant, is in store for the northern Seals, which are slaughtered so ruthlessly and in such a wasteful manner for their oil, that their numbers are decreasing with alarming rapidity.

Perhaps no animal suffers more severely at the hand of man than the American Bison. At the commencement of the present century it roamed in vast herds from the north-western corner of the Gulf of Mexico in the south, to the Great Slave Lake in the north, and from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Mississippi and Lake Winnipeg in the east; having even at that time already disappeared from a vast tract of country lying to the east of that river, including parts of the States of Mississippi, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Western Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York, and bounded on the north by the southern shores of Lakes Erie and Michigan. Over this vast extent of country the Bisons swarmed in countless herds, blackening the prairies with their multitudes, and leaving tracts still unobliterated by time. The multitudes of these animals formerly seen by travellers cannot be estimated, and days were spent in passing through the great herds scattered over the prairies, which, now alas, in many cases are covered only with their bleaching bones.* Hunted

* In the years 1872-3-4 no less than 10,793,300 pounds of bones were carried by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway: J. A. Allen, "The American Bison," Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass.' vol. iv. (1876) p. 190.

VOL. III.

from place to place, killed at all seasons of the year (the preference being given to the cows and calves), driven into pounds, or over precipices, slaughtered in the snow, or on the ice, whole herds destroyed from sheer love of destruction, this useful animal, to which the natives looked for the food they ate, the robes they wore, and the tent which sheltered them, as well as for their simple implements of domestic use, and even the very fuel which in the treeless prairie supplied their camp fires-thus persecuted, this noble beast decreased in numbers with fearful rapidity, till in the year 1849, the area over which it was to be found had been reduced to a narrow tract of country, extending continuously along the base of the Rocky Mountains, from the Rio Grand, in longitude 32°, to the plains of the Saskatchewan, and northward to the wooded regions of the Athabasca and Peace Rivers. But about this time the great stream of overland immigration, following the Kansas and Platte Rivers, and thence westward by the South Pass over the Rocky Mountains into California, exterminated the Bison along its route, and broke the sad remnant up into two herds, one north, the other south of the line of march. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad has increased the separation, and the two herds are retiring year by year farther and farther from their persecutors.* That the disappearance of the Bison from such an enormous tract of country in so short a period is the result of reckless and cruel persecution in every form there cannot be the least doubt, and should the present wasteful destruction be continued the species will soon be exterminated.

Catlin, in his letters on the North American Indians, written between the years 1832 and 1839, gives most interesting particulars of the habits and distribution of this animal, as well as of the mode pursued in those days for its destruction, and expresses himself as certain, from the profligate waste of the life of these noble and useful creatures, which were killed in large numbers merely for the sake of their tongues, that their extinction was near at band. He mentions one instance in which, in May, 1832, a

* Allen, loc. cit.

party of Sioux Indians encamped near a Fur Companies Fort, on the Upper Missouri, pursued an immense herd of Buffalos which had showed itself, and in a few hours returned to the fort with 1400 tongues, these they threw down in a mass, demanding for them only a few gallons of whiskey. From all that he could learn not a skin nor a pound of meat, save only the tongues, was brought in. Catlin points out the sin incurred by the white men, who not only induce the natives recklessly to destroy the food supply absolutely necessary for their existence, but in return cultivate in them a taste for alcohol most degrading in its effects, and concludes a pathetic reverie with the following words: "Oh! miserable man, is thy avarice such! wouldst thou tear the skin from the back of the last animal of this noble race, and rob thy fellow-man of his meat, and for it give him poison!" Alas, the present state of the aboriginal population of North-West America but too fully replies to his ejaculation. Degraded by contact with civilization, hunted from reservation to reservation, their food supply destroyed, the only resource left them is to obtain the necessaries to support life from Government supplies.

But if the destruction of these animals was so great in Catlin's time, when fire-arms were rare and transit so difficult, what must be the state of affairs at the present moment? when not only the native armed with his bow and spear, but the white hunter with his revolving rifle is let loose upon these herds of stupid and still unsuspecting beasts, in addition to which a railroad runs through the most prolific hunting-grounds, ready to convey the spoils to market in any quantities. I will not trouble you with a long extract as time will not permit of it, but I should just like to quote a few statistics from an article published in the 'Standard' newspaper of the 12th September, 1879. The writer says, founding his remarks upon a report recently drawn up by Dr. Joel Allen for the United States Congress: "In the United States territory also the decrease of the great wild oxen has been rapid, and owing to very similar causes, the chief of which is the reckless manner in which they have been slaughtered for the sake of their tongues, 'robes,' and perhaps, though not always, their tallow. The Red River half-breed, when he gets into

a herd of Bison simply slaughters them. The weapon he uses is either a revolver, or, for the sake of more rapid firing, a smooth bore, flint lock, trade musket. He never pauses, but pours in his shot, often at such close quarters that the skin is singed by the flash. He enters the chase with his mouth filled with bullets. As fast as a shot is discharged he pours into the musket a handful of powder from the horn around his neck, a bullet from his mouth is then dropped down the barrel, with a tap of the stock on the saddle, and there it adheres long enough to the powder to enable him to depress and discharge his weapon into one of the animals alongside. This goes on all day if prey is abundant, and in the evening the identification of the slain is effected by means of the marked bullets, etc. . . . If meat is in demand, the carcases are stripped, and the process of drying and pemmican-making is resorted to by the women and children. If not, the hide and tongues are alone taken, and tons of valuable food are left to the Wolves, or to rot on the prairie. But near lines of the Pacific Railroads, the convenience with which the 'robes' can be conveyed to market, has led, within the last five or six years, to an even more wholesale slaughter than in the north. . . . According to authentic data it seems that in 1872 there passed over the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad 165,721 buffalo hides. In 1873, the number had risen to 251,443, and in addition dried meat to the amount of 1,617,000 pounds was dispatched to the eastern towns, though it is clear that a vast quantity was allowed to go to ruin. Of late years, however, owing to this prodigious massacre, the number of hides has greatly decreased, though the 'buffalo-skinners' have redoubled their efforts to obtain their vanishing prey.'

...

From another source I learn ('Standard,' 13th September, 1879) that it is calculated by Mr. Wm. Blackmore, that in the three years, 1872-3-4, no less than four-and-a-half millions of these animals were killed, and that "three millions of them were slaughtered for the sake of their hides alone." The result of all this is that the Red River carts now as often return empty as laden; last year the buffalo season on the Saskatchewan was an utter