Powerful voices have been raised of late in favour of the preservation of African wild life, and this especially in England. In this respect, Mr. Edward North Buxton is most prominent in pressing for thorough measures of protection for the African fauna, throughout the wide possessions or spheres of interest of the British Empire. In England, too, many strong pleas have been made in support of the view that even relatively speaking noxious animals should not be deprived by man of the right to a certain amount of protection. Thus Sir H. H. Johnston, the former Governor of the Uganda Province in Central Africa, says in his preface to the English edition of my book With Flashlight and Rifle, that in his opinion the weasel, the owl, and the primitive British badger of the existing fauna ought not to be entirely sacrificed to the pheasant—a beautiful enough bird, but, after all, one that must always remain an “interloper”; that the egret, the bird of paradise, the chinchilla, the sea-otter,[15] and such-like creatures are “æsthetically as important,” and have the same right to existence, as a woman beautifully dressed in the spoils of these animals. Good pioneer work in this direction must result from the noble-hearted resolve of the Queen of England to put herself at the head of the “Anti-Osprey Movement,” organised to save the royal heron from threatened extinction.
There can be no doubt that the complete extermination of any species of animal must excite in the mind of a reflecting man a sense of injustice and wrong; and that this complete destruction of certain species can only be to the interest of all men in general when such animals, of whatever kind they may be, are entirely noxious and quite useless. No epoch in the world’s history can be set in comparison with ours in so far as it has been the witness, in the course of a few decades, of almost daily progress and improvement in connection with industry, culture, and the whole field of human knowledge. And, moreover, no epoch has been so penetrated with the great thoughts of progressive humanity. The continual employment—in ways that are ever more adroit, ever more complex—of all the resources offered by nature to man, seems at the same time to blind him to certain grave misdeeds that he is actually perpetrating every day. These great crimes against the harmony and order with which nature surrounds us—crimes that it is not easy to make any amends for—are the disfigurement and poisoning of watercourses, the pollution of the air, the laying waste of a portion of the plant world (namely, the forests), and the extinction of some of the animals that live with us.
We do not shrink from the most reckless exploitation of those forests that have come down to us from the primeval past—the vast stores of coal buried deep in the bosom of the earth. The expert can now calculate with certainty that in a few hundred, at the very farthest in a thousand, years these stores will be exhausted. When it comes to this, the triumphant progress of industrial science will no doubt give us some substitute, perhaps even something better; but no technical knowledge, no science, can ever give us back anew those highly developed organisms of the plant and animal world which man to-day is recklessly sweeping out of the list of living things. They cannot restore to us the green woods and their animal life. We preserve with punctilious precision every vestige of the art of the past. The older the documents of earlier historic times are, the more eagerly they are coveted, the more highly they are valued. Our collectors gladly pay the largest sums for an old papyrus, an old picture, an object of decorative art, or a marble statue. And, as has been rightly remarked, what warrant have we that some new Phidias, some new Michael Angelo, some new Praxiteles will not arise, and give us something of as high value as these, or even much more perfect? Unreservedly to deny this would be the same thing as to give the lie to the progress of the human race.
But the same man who, in this respect, acts so reverently, so conservatively, looks on with folded arms while treasures are destroyed that ought to be guarded with special affection and care, in these times when the great value of all natural science is so fully recognised.[16]
We organise, at an extremely high cost, expeditions to survey and explore far-off regions. We sink into the greatest depths of the sea our cunningly devised trawl-nets, and study with ceaseless diligence the smallest organisms that they bring up into the light of day. We consider the course of the stars, and calculate with precision their remote orbits. We daily discover new secrets, and have almost ceased to feel surprised at each day bringing us something new, something yet unheard of. Much that is thus done to secure the treasures of the past might equally well be done in coming years. But much that we neglect to do can never be made good, for we are permitting the slaughter, up to the point of extinction, of the most remarkable, the most interesting, and the least known forms among the most highly organised of the creatures that dwell with us on our earth!
An example that appeals to us with terrible force is that of South Africa (taking the country in its widest limits), a region now so largely peopled by Europeans. There has been an almost complete disappearance of the larger animals that once lived in their millions on its wide plains. If one studies the trustworthy narratives of the earlier explorers, one reads that, hardly a century ago, it was not a rare sight to see in one day a hundred, or even a hundred and fifty rhinoceroses, hundreds of elephants that showed little fear of man, and countless antelopes; and one asks oneself, How can it be possible that all this abundance of life has vanished in so short a time? A specimen of the “white” rhinoceros, which in those times was still living in large numbers, is in our day worth a small fortune; it is to be found in no museum in Germany, and is simply almost impossible to obtain. This former abundance is now known only to few, and these only specialists engaged in studies of this kind. But to them it is also plain and terribly certain that, where the like conditions come into being, the same process that was at work in South Africa will produce the same results.
There can be no doubt about it. In a hundred years from now wide regions of what once was Darkest Africa will have been more or less civilised, and all that delightful animal world, which to-day still lives its life there, will have succumbed to the might of civilised man. That will be the time when the fortunate possessors of horns and hides of extinct African antelopes, and the owners of elephant tusks, skulls, and specimens of all kinds will be selling all this for its weight in gold. And no one will be able to understand how it was that in our day so little thought was given to preserving as far as possible all this valuable material in abundant quantities at least for the sake of science, instead of sacrificing it wholesale to the interests of trade, and to the recklessness of the new settlers in those lands. For these men, who have to struggle hard with the new conditions of life and its necessities, can scarcely act otherwise than heedlessly and short-sightedly. They will always take possession of a district before settled conditions are introduced, and before the Government is in a position to enforce the observance of its regulations, however well-intentioned these may be. So it will come to pass that it will suddenly be found no longer possible to provide European collections with even a pair of specimens of the mighty elephant, or to procure other large animals for exhibition in these establishments. And this will be the case not only with regard to the larger species, but the same thing will happen to all others.
C. G. Schillings, phot.
A SCENE IN THE CAMEROONS (GERMAN WEST AFRICA), SHOWING THREE LARGE GORILLAS SHOT BY CAPTAIN DOMINICK.
(PHOTOGRAPH SUPPLIED BY CAPTAIN DOMINICK.)