“But that’s a case all by itself,” the boy replied.
“No,” said Antoine, “exactly the same thing happened in Europe. There, the great wild ox, the aurochs—the urus that Cæsar speaks of—a giant bovine six feet high at the shoulder, defied man, certainly until the twelfth century, and probably a few were still alive when Columbus sailed for the New World.”
“Are there none left now?”
“Not one,” was the reply; “there are a few European bison and a few wild cattle of another species, kept in parks in Europe, but the true aurochs is gone for ever.”
“I suppose, after a while,” said Perry, mournfully, “there won’t be any wild animal left for us to hunt. When all the open land is turned into farms and all the forests are cleared and handled for lumber, then all the bears and wolves and mountain lions will be shot, and museums, a thousand years from now, will be as keen for the skeleton of a grizzly bear as we should be to-day for an aurochs.”
“Undoubtedly,” Antoine answered, “and when Africa is settled, lions and tigers, rhinoceroses and hippopotami will all go. Man has created a new age, Perry, the age of usefulness, and the only chance of survival an animal has to-day is to become a slave to Man. In order to do that, an animal has to have a good enough brain to learn. The primitive types are small-brained and will die.
“Think, Perry, if a rhinoceros could be taught to carry a load, how valuable he would be in the African jungle! But he fights Man instead, and so he must be killed. If a tiger could be trained to guard a flock of sheep, as a collie is trained, and a collie’s ancestors were wolf-like, how safe that flock would be! But the tiger cannot be trained, the whole cat tribe is treacherous. It is the big-brained dog, and the big-brained horse, and the big-brained elephant that become the friends and the servants of Man and thus win a new right to live.”
“That does seem to make Man the boss.”
“Man is the boss,” the young paleontologist agreed. “He gives the word to live or die, because his is the ruling brain of the world. Before Man came, every creature that lived was the slave to Nature, but Man is Nature’s master. I think the fossils show that,” concluded Antoine, as the tents of the Museum camp hove in sight, “for we see the world of the olden time preparing for the coming of Man.”
“And will Man, too, become extinct and some other animal take his place?”