In our colonies much has been lately done towards clearing up the hitherto hidden secrets of animal life. But if one remembers how many different opinions there are, even amongst authorities at home in Germany, with regard to many of the questions relating to our home fauna, one will pass a more lenient judgment on the many sharp controversies about matters of this kind in the tropics.
But nothing of value is to be hoped for from controversial strife over divergent theories. All men who have acquired expert knowledge on these difficult matters should rather unite in a common task, and strive by co-operation to obtain some adequate result.
In the wide British colonial possessions in Africa very extensive reservations have been established, in which no one is allowed to harm the animals. The practice of making exceptions in favour of certain officials has not been found to answer, and has been given up. So now wide districts of British Africa rank as animal sanctuaries.
In German Africa, too, the authorities have tried, as far as they can, to obtain useful results by similar methods. Unfortunately serious events of many kinds are daily contributing to the diminution in numbers of the fauna of German Africa. Thus the war in South-West Africa is sweeping away the still surviving stock of wild animals as with an iron broom.
In the face of all this, all parties concerned should take their share in common action. Our museums should be provided with the necessary material. Even if our knowledge of the African fauna has made sufficient progress, it further concerns us to exert an educating and informing influence on every pioneer of our colonies, so that he may not come in contact with that beautiful animal world in utter ignorance of it. Unfortunately we are still greatly wanting in this respect. However, in recent years a great amount of material has been placed at the disposal of the museums by our colonial officers, officials, and private individuals. Many of them have even made important contributions to our special knowledge of the animal world.
But now, whether it is a question of tracing out the hidden and unknown life and ways of that equatorial animal world that has come into our possession, or of investigating the customs and languages of races that are barely discovered, or of tracking the horrors of tropical diseases and the germs that excite them and becoming master of that miniature world of life with the lens and the microscope, or of going into the wilderness as a sportsman—the men who devote themselves to all these pursuits will be led onwards by that spell, whose name the reader guesses, the spell of unchanged primeval conditions and untouched nature!
May as many as possible of our German sportsmen go forth into our tropical possessions and yield themselves up to this spell! That which in our hunting grounds at home speaks to their hearts in the rustling of the oak and beech woods and on familiar moors and fields, they will find in a far higher degree in that far-off wilderness under the German flag. Returning home, may they, working in unison, and by mutually supplying what each may lack, bring into existence some splendid memorial of the joys of German sport.