Mr. C. William Beebe, who recently has visited the Far East, has described how the state of Selangor, between Malacca and Penang, has taken on many airs of improvement since 1878, and sections of Sarawak Territory are being cut down and burned for the growing of rubber. Despite this I am trying to think that those developments menace the total volume of the wild life of those regions but little. I wonder if those tangled, illimitable, ever-renewing jungles yet know that their faces have been scratched. White men never will exterminate the big game of the really dense jungles of the eastern tropics; but with enough axes, snares, guns and cartridges the natives may be able to accomplish it!
In Malayana there are some jungles so dense, so tangled with lianas and so thorny with Livistonias and rattan that nothing larger than a cat can make way through them. There are thousands of square miles so boggy, so swampy, so dark, gloomy and mosquito-ridden that all men fear them and avoid them, and in them rubber culture must be impossible. In those silent places the gaur, the rhino, the Malay sambar, the clouded leopard and the orang-utan surely are measurably safe from the game-bags and market gunners of the shooting world. It is good to think that there is an equatorial belt of jungle clear around the world, in Central and South America as well as in the old World, in which there will be little extermination in our day, except of birds for the feather market. But the open plains, open mountains, and open forests of Asia and Australasia are in different case. Eventually they will be "shot out."
China, all save Yunnan and western Mongolia, is now horribly barren of wild life. Can it ever be brought back? We think it can not. The millions of population are too many; and except in the great forest tracts, the spread of modern firearms will make an end of the game. Already the pheasants are being swept out of China for the London market, and extinction is staring several species in the face. On the whole, the pheasants of the Old World are being hit hard by the rubber-planting craze. Mr. Beebe declares that owing to the inrush of aggressive capital, the haunts of many species of pheasants are being denuded of all their natural cover, and some mountain species that are limited to small areas are practically certain to be exterminated at an early date.
Destruction Of Animals For Fur. —In the far North, only the interior of Kamchatka seems to be safe from the iron heel of the skin-hunter. A glance at the list of furs sold in London last year reveals one or two things that are disquieting. The total catch of furs for the year 1911 is enormous,—considering the great scarcity of wild life on two continents. Incidentally it must be remembered that every trapper carries a gun, and in studying the fur list one needs no help in trying to imagine the havoc wrought with firearms on the edible wild life of the regions that contributed all that fur. I have been told by trappers that as a class, trappers are great killers of game.
In order that the reader may know by means of definite figures the extent to which the world is being raked and combed for fur-bearing animals, we append below a statement copied from the Fur News Magazine for November, 1912, of the sales of the largest London fur house during the past two years.
With varying emotions we call attention to the wombat of Australia, 3,841; grebe, 51,261, and house cat, 92,407. Very nearly all the totals of Lampson & Co. for each species are much lower for the sales of 1912 than for those of 1911. Is this fact significant of a steady decline?