THE COMPLETED SPECIMEN IN THE MUNICH MUSEUM (GIRAFFA SCHILLINGSI, Mtsch.).
ANOTHER OF MY SPECIMENS IN THE STUTTGART MUSEUM.
Great stress ought always to be laid upon the point to which I have here called attention, and I can appeal to every expert on the subject for confirmation of my opinion.
PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY OF A MALE GIRAFFE GAZELLE (LITHOCRANIUS WALLERI, Brocke) SHOT BY THE AUTHOR. AN EXTREMELY BEAUTIFUL AND RARE SPECIES, FIRST SEEN BY THE AUTHOR IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA IN 1896.
I think that I have earned a special right to speak on this matter. For the last fifteen years I have hardly ever carried a gun when at home in Europe; I have refused the most pressing invitations to shooting parties; and I have sought pleasure only in the sight of our native wild animals, which I know so well, and in secretly watching and observing them. But in the midst of a yet unstudied foreign fauna, of which we still know little or nothing, where there is question of first obtaining some scanty knowledge oneself, and forming collections for definite scientific research—in the midst of an animal world of this kind I would not hesitate to shoot even large numbers of each species. For there would be good reason for not merely securing well-developed male specimens, as the hunter does, but also females and young animals in all the various stages of growth and colouring. This must be obvious even to a child, and no one will deny to science the right so to act, at least in those regions of Africa which—in comparison with India and other countries—are still untouched by civilisation, and which therefore, in their primitive unchanged condition, afford us doubly interesting results. Now supposing one has got together large collections, and has been so fortunate as to succeed in bringing them down to the coast and home to Europe. A collection of insects or of the lower animals may pass without remark; but woe to the slayer of the larger species of wild animals! These come under the description of “beasts of the chase,” and now a peculiar kind of bacillus quickly develops—the bacillus of “hostility to the hunter,” which, introduced into Europe from the tropics, finds here, too, a fostering soil. Let me be allowed to endeavour to find a prophylactic against this bacillus in these essays. I have already often laid stress upon the facts that such great quantities of the skins and feathers of birds are exported for the purposes of fashion, that by this trade whole species are threatened with extinction; that every individual European is allowed, without any hindrance, to send home his trophies of the chase—trophies which, with only a few exceptions, can have hardly any value for science; above all, that the extermination of the elephant in Africa is being carried out before our very eyes for the sake of his ivory; and that all this is held permissible. But let one make collections for scientific purposes, and scrupulously hand over every skin, every hide, with the horns and skull belonging to it, all carefully labelled, to some museum at home, and, according to widely expressed opinion, he is greatly to blame for the destruction of animal life.
DWARF ANTELOPE IN THE CARLSRUHE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM.
