All the operations of rural husbandry are destructive to spontaneous vegetation by the voluntary subst.i.tution of domestic for wild plants, and, as we have seen, the armies of the colonist are attended by troops of irregular and unrecognized camp-followers, which soon establish and propagate themselves over the new conquests. These unbidden and hungry guests--the gipsies of the vegetable world--often have great apt.i.tude for accommodation and acclimation, and sometimes even crowd out the native growth to make room for themselves. The botanist Latham informs us that indigenous flowering plants, once abundant on the North-Western prairies, have been so nearly extirpated by the inroads of half-wild vegetables which have come in the train of the Eastern immigrant, that there is reason to fear that, in a few years, his herbarium will const.i.tute the only evidence of their former existence. [Footnote: Report of Commissioner of Agriculture of the United States for 1870.]
There are plants--themselves perhaps sometimes stragglers from their proper habitat--which are found only in small numbers and in few localities. These are eagerly sought by the botanist, and some such species are believed to be on the very verge of extinction, from the zeal of collectors.
ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL AGENCY.
The quant.i.tative value of animated life, as a geological agency, seems to be inversely as the volume of the individual organism; for nature supplies by numbers what is wanting in the bulk of the animal out of whose remains or structures she forms strata covering whole provinces, and builds up from the depths of the sea large islands, if not continents. There are, it is true, near the mouths of the great Siberian rivers which empty themselves into the Polar Sea, drift islands composed, in an incredibly large proportion, of the bones and tusks of elephants, mastodons, and other huge pachyderms, and many extensive caves in various parts of the world are half filled with the skeletons of quadrupeds, sometimes lying loose in the earth, sometimes cemented together into an osseous breccia by a calcareous deposit or other binding material. These remains of large animals, though found in comparatively late formations, generally belong to extinct species, and their modern congeners or representatives do not exist in sufficient numbers to be of sensible importance in geology or in geography by the mere ma.s.s of their skeletons. [Footnote: Could the bones and other relics of the domestic quadrupeds destroyed by disease or slaughtered for human use in civilized countries be collected into large deposits, as obscure causes have gathered together those of extinct animals, they would soon form aggregations which might almost be called mountains.
There were in the United States, in 1870, as we shall see hereafter, nearly one hundred millions of horses, black cattle, sheep, and swine.
There are great numbers of all the same animals in the British American Provinces and in Mexico, and there are large herds of wild horses on the plains, and of tamed among the independent Indian tribes of North America. It would perhaps not be extravagant to suppose that all these cattle may amount to two thirds as many as those of the United States, and thus we have in North America a total of 160,000,000 domestic quadrupeds belonging to species introduced by European colonization, besides dogs, cats, and other four-footed household pets and pests, also of foreign origin.
If we allow half a solid foot to the skeleton and other slowly destructible parts of each animal, the remains of these herds would form a cubical ma.s.s measuring not much short of four hundred and fifty feet to the side, or a pyramid equal in dimensions to that of Cheops, and as the average life of these animals does not exceed six or seven years, the acc.u.mulations of their bones, horns, hoofs, and other durable remains would amount to at least fifteen times as great a volume in a single century. It is true that the actual ma.s.s of solid matter, left by the decay of dead domestic quadrupeds and permanently added to the crust of the earth, is not so great as this calculation makes it. The greatest proportion of the soft parts of domestic animals, and even of the bones, is soon decomposed, through direct consumption by man and other carnivora, industrial use, and employment as manure, and enters into new combinations in which its animal origin is scarcely traceable; there is, nevertheless, a large annual residuum, which, like decayed vegetable matter, becomes a part of the superficial mould; and in any event, brute life immensely changes the form and character of the superficial strata, if it does not sensibly augment the quant.i.ty of the matter composing them. The remains of man, too, add to the earthy coating that covers the face of the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a cople of feet beneath the sculptures of the ign.o.ble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has removed, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, of not wholly composed of them; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of the Pet.i.t Champ des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fellow-man.] But the vegetable products found with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs of some of them, are those of yet extant plants; and besides this evidence, the discovery of works of human art, deposited in juxtaposition with fossil bones, and evidently at the same time and by the same agency which buried these latter--not to speak of human bones found in the same strata--proves that the animals whose former existence they testify were contemporaneous with man, and possibly even extirpated by him. [Footnote: The bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons, and the bones of animals now extinct are often wrought into arms and utensils, or split to extract the marrow. These accounts have often been discredited, because it has been a.s.sumed that the extinction of these animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it certain that this conclusion has been too hastily adopted.
On page 143 of the Antiquity of Man, Lyell remarks that man "no doubt played his part in hastening the era of the extincion" of the large pachyderms and beasts of prey; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which man cannot be supposed to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be ascribed to human action alone.
On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organisms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea.] I do not propose to enter upon the th.o.r.n.y question, whether the existing races of man are genealogically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that man, in his earliest known stages of existence, was probably a destructive power upon the earth, though perhaps not so emphatically as his present representatives. The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in any one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; but they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. If the myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds which wander over the plains of Southern Africa--and the slaughter of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and a brutal triumph to professedly civilized hunters--if the herds of the American bison, which are numbered by hundreds of thousands, do not produce visible changes in the forms of terrestrial surface, they have at least an immense influence on the growth and distribution of vegetable life, and, of course, indirectly upon all the physical conditions of soil and climate between which and vegetation a mutual interdependence exists. In the preceding chapter I referred to the agency of the beaver in the formation of bogs as producing sensible geographical effects.
I am disposed to think that more bogs in the Northern States owe their origin to beavers than to accidental obstructions of rivulets by wind-fallen or naturally decayed trees; for there are few swamps in those States, at the outlets of which we may not, by careful search, find the remains of a beaver dam. The beaver sometimes inhabits natural lakelets and even large rivers like the Upper Mississippi, when the current is not too rapid, but he prefers to owe his pond to his own ingenuity and toil. The reservoir once constructed, its inhabitants rapidly multiply so long as the trees, and the harvests of pond lilies and other aquatic plants on which this quadruped feeds in winter, suffice for the supply of the growing population. But the extension of the water causes the death of the neighboring trees, and the annual growth of those which could be reached by ca.n.a.ls and floated to the pond soon becomes insufficient for the wants of the community, and the beaver metropolis now sends out expeditions of discovery and colonization. The pond gradually fills up, by the operation of the same causes as when it owes its existence to an accidental obstruction, and when, at last, the original settlement is converted into a bog by the usual processes of vegetable life, the remaining inhabitants abandon it and build on some virgin brooklet a new city of the waters. [Footnote: I find confirmation of my own observations on this point (published in 1863) in the North-West Pa.s.sage by Land of Milton and Cheadle, London, 1865. These travellers observed "a long chain of marshes formed by the damming up of a stream which had now ceased to exist," Chap. X. In Chap. XII, they state that "nearly every stream between the Pembina and the Athabasca--except the large river McLeod--appeared to have been destroyed by the agency of the beaver," and they question whether the vast extent of swampy ground in that region "has not been brought to this condition by the work of beavers who have thus destroyed, by their own labor, the streams necessary to their own existence."
But even here nature provides a remedy, for when the process of "consolidation" referred to in treating of bogs in the first chapter shall have been completed, and the forest re-established upon the marshes, the water now diffused through them will be collected in the lower or more yielding portions, cut new channels for their flow, become running brooks, and thus restore the ancient aspect of the surface.
The authors add the curious observation that the beavers of the present day seem to be a degenerate race, as they neither fell huge trees not construct great dams, while their progenitors cut down trees two feet in diameter and dammed up rivers a hundred feet in width. The change in the habits of the beaver is probably due to the diminution of their numbers since the introduction of fire-arms, and to the tact that their hydraulic operations are more frequently interrupted by the encroachments of man. In the valley of the Yellowstone, which has but lately been much visited by the white man, Hayden saw stumps of trees thirty inches in diameter which had been cut down by beavers.
--Geological Survey of Wyoming, p. 135.
The American beaver closely resembles his European congener, and I believe most naturalists now regard them as identical. A difference of speceies has been inferred from a difference in their modes of life, the European animal being solitary and not a builder, the American gregarious and constructive. But late careful researches in Germany have shown the former existence of numerous beaver dams in that country, though the animal, having becaome rare to form colonies, has of course ceased to attempt works which require the co-operation of numerous individuals.--Schleiden, Fur Baum und Wald Leipzig, 1870, p. 68.
On the question of ident.i.ty and on all others relating to this interesting animal, see L.H. Morgan"s important monograph, The American Beaver and his Works, Philadelphia, 1868. Among the many new facts observed by this investigator is the construction of ca.n.a.ls by the beaver to float trunks and branches of trees to his ponds. These ca.n.a.ls are sometimes 600 to 700 feet long, with a width of two or three feet and a depth of one to one and a half.]
INFLUENCE OF ANIMAL LIFE ON VEGETATION
The influence of wild quadrupeds upon vegetable life have been little studied, and not many facts bearing upon it have been recorded, but, so far as it is known, it appears to be conservative rather than pernicious. Few wild animals depend for their subsistence on vegetable products obtainable only by the destruction of the plant, and they seem to confine their consumption almost exclusively to the annual harvest of leaf or twig, or at least of parts of the vegetable easily reproduced.
If there are exceptions to this rule, they are in cases where the numbers of the animal are so proportioned to the abundance of the vegetable that there is no danger of the extermination of the plant from the voracity of the quadruped, or of the extinction of the quadruped from the scarcity of the plant. [Footnote: European foresters speak of the action of the squirrel as injurious to trees. Doubtless this is sometimes true in the case of artificial forests, but in woods of spontaneous growth, ordered and governed by nature, the squirrel does not attack trees, or at least the injury he may do is too trifling to be perceptible, but he is a formidable enemy to the plantation. "The squirrels bite the cones of the pine and consume the seed which might serve to restock the wood; they do still more mischief by gnawing off, near the leading shoot, a strip of bark, and thus often completely girdling the tree. Trees so injured must be felled, as they would never acquire a vigorous growth. The squirrel is especially destructive to the pine in Sologne, where he gnaws the bark of trees twenty or twenty-five years old." But even here, nature sometimes provides a compensation, by making the appet.i.te of this quadruped serve to prevent an excessive production of seed cones, which tends to obstruct the due growth of the leading shoot. "In some of the pineries of Brittany which produce cones so abundantly as to strangle the development of the leading shoot of the maritime pine, it has been observed that the pines are most vigorous where the squirrels are most numerous, a result attributed to the repression of the cones by this rodent."--Boitel, Mise en valeur des Terres pauvres, p. 50.
Very interesting observations, on the agency of the squirrel and other small animals in planting and in destroying nuts and other seeds of trees, may be found in a paper on the Succession of Forests in Th.o.r.eau"s Excursions, pp. 135 et seqq.
I once saw several quarts of beech-nuts taken from the winter quarters of a family of flying squirrels in a hollow tree. The kernels were neatly stripped of the sh.e.l.ls and carefully stored in a dry cavity.] In diet and natural wants the bison resembles the ox, the ibex and the chamois a.s.similate themselves to the goat and the sheep; but while the wild animal does not appear to be a destructive agency in the garden of nature, his domestic congeners are eminently so. [Footnote: Evelyn thought the depasturing of gra.s.s by cattle serviceable to its growth.
"The biting of cattle," he remarks, "gives a gentle loosening to the roots of the herbage, and makes it to grow fine and sweet, and their very breath and treading as well as soil, and the comfort of their warm bodies, is wholesome and marvellously cherishing."--Terra, or Philosophical Discourses of Earth, p. 86.
In a note upon this pa.s.sage, Hunter observes: "Nice farmers consider the lying of a beast upon the ground, for one night only, as a sufficient tilth for the year. The breath of graminivorous quadrupeds does certainly enrich the roots of gra.s.s; a circ.u.mstance worthy of the attention of the philosophical farmer."--Terra, same page.
The "philosophical farmer" of the present day will not adopt these opinions without some qualification, and they certainly are not sustained by American observation.
The Report of the Department of Agriculture for March and April, 1872, states that the native gra.s.ses are disappearing from the prairies of Texas, especially on the bottom-lands, depasturing of cattle being destructive to them.] This is partly from the change of habits resulting from domestication and a.s.sociation with man, partly from the fact that the number of reclaimed animals is not determined by the natural relation of demand and spontaneous supply which regulates the multiplication of wild creatures, but by the convenience of man, who is, in comparatively few things, amenable to the control of the merely physical arrangements of nature. When the domesticated animal escapes from human jurisdiction, as in the case of the ox, the horse, the goat, and perhaps the a.s.s--which, so far as I know, are the only well-authenticated instances of the complete emanc.i.p.ation of household quadrupeds--he becomes again an unresisting subject of nature, and all his economy is governed by the same laws as that of his fellows which have never been enslaved by man; but, so long as he obeys a human lord, he is an auxiliary in the warfare his master is ever waging against all existences except those which he can tame to a willing servitude.
ORIGIN AND TRANSFER OF DOMESTIC QUADRUPEDS.
Civilization is so intimately a.s.sociated with certain inferior forms of animal life, if not dependent on them, that cultivated man has never failed to accompany himself, in all his migrations, with some of these humble attendants. The ox, the horse, the sheep, and even the comparatively useless dog and cat, as well as several species of poultry, are voluntarily transferred by every emigrant colony, and they soon multiply to numbers far exceeding those of the wild genera most nearly corresponding to them. [Footnote: The rat and the mouse, though not voluntarily transported, are pa.s.sengers by every ship that sails for a foreign port, and several species of these quadrupeds have, consequently, much extended their range and increased their numbers in modern times. From a story of Heliogabalus related by Lampridius, Hist.
Aug. Scriptores, ed. Casaubon, 1690, p. 110, it would seem that mice at least were not very common in ancient Rome. Among the capricious freaks of that emperor, it is said that he undertook to investigate the statistics of the arachnoid population of the capital, and that 10,000 pounds of spiders (or spiders" webs--for aranea is equivocal) were readily collected; but when he got up a mouse-show, he thought ten thousand mice a very fair number. Rats are not less numerous in all great cities; and in Paris, where their skins are used for gloves, and their flesh, it is whispered, in some very complex and equivocal dishes, they are caught by legions. I have read of a manufacturer who contracted to buy of the rat-catchers, at a high price, all the rat-skins they could furnish before a certain date, and failed, within a week, for want of capital, when the stock of peltry had run up to 600,000.
Civilization has not contented itself with the introduction of domestic animals alone. The English sportsman imports foxes from the continent, and Grimalkin-like turns them loose in order that he may have the pleasure of chasing them afterwards.]
Of the origin of our domestic animals, we know historically nothing, because their domestication belongs to the ages which preceded written annals; but though they cannot all be specifically identified with now extant wild animals, it is presumable that they have been reclaimed from an originally wild state. Ancient writers have preserved to us fewer data respecting the introduction of domestic animals into new countries than respecting the transplantation of domestic vegetables. Ritter, in his learned essay on the camel, has shown that this animal was not employed by the Egyptians until a comparatively late period in their history; [Footnote: The horse and the a.s.s were equally unknown to ancient Egypt, and do not appear in the sculptures before the XV. and XVI. dynasties. But even then, the horse was only known as a draught animal, and the only representation of a horseman yet found in the Egyptian tombs is on the blade of a battle axe of uncertain origin and period.] that he was unknown to the Carthaginians until after the downfall of their commonwealth; and that his first appearance in Western Africa is more recent still. The Bactrian camel was certainly brought from Asia Minor to the Northern sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea, by the Goths, in the third or fourth century, and the buffalo first appeared in Italy about A.D. 600, though it is unknown whence or by whom he was introduced. [Footnote: Erdkunde, viii., Asien, 1ste Abtheuung, pp.
660,758. Hehn, Kuttonpflanzen, p. 845.] The Arabian single-humped camel, or dromedary, has been carried to the Canary Islands, partially introduced into Australia, Greece, Spain, and even Tuscany, experimented upon to little purpose in Venezuela, and finally imported by the American Government into Texas and New Mexico, where it finds the climate and the vegetable products best suited to its wants, and promises to become a very useful agent in the promotion of the special civilization for which those regions are adapted.
Quadrupeds, both domestic and wild, bear the privations and discomforts of long voyages better than would be supposed. The elephant, the giraffe, the rhinoceros, and even the hippopotamus, do not seem to suffer much at sea. Some of the camels imported by the U.S. government into Texas from the Crimea and Northern Africa were a whole year on shipboard. On the other hand, George Sand, in Un Hiver au Midi, gives an amusing description of the sea-sickness of swine in the short pa.s.sage from the Baleares to Barcelona. America had no domestic quadruped but a species of dog, the lama tribe, and, to a certain extent, the bison or buffalo. [Footnote: See Chapter III., post; also Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, i., p. 71. From the anatomical character of the bones of the urus, or auerochs, found among the relics of the lacustrine population of ancient Switzerland, and from other circ.u.mstances, it is inferred that this animal had been domesticated by that people; and it is stated, I know not upon what authority, in Le Alpi che cingono l"Italia, that it had been tamed by the Veneti also. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, pp. 24, 25, and the last-named work, p. 480. This is a fact of much interest, because it is one of the very few HISTORICALLY known instances of the extinction of a domestic quadruped, and the extreme improbability of such an event gives some countenance to the theory of the ident.i.ty of the domestic ox with, and its descent from, the urus.]Of course, it owes the horse, the a.s.s, the ox, the sheep, the goat, and the swine, as does also Australia, to European colonization. Modern Europe has, thus far, not accomplished much in the way of importation of new animals, though some interesting essays have been made. The reindeer was successfully introduced into Iceland about a century ago, while similar attempts failed, about the same time, in Scotland. The Cashmere or Thibet goat was brought to France a generation since, and succeeds well. The same or an allied species and the Asiatic buffalo were carried to South Carolina about the year 1850, and the former, at least, is thought likely to prove of permanent value in the United States. [Footnote: The goat introduced into South Carolina was brought from the district of Angora, in Asia Minor, which has long been celebrated for flocks of this valuable animal. It is calculated that more than a million of these goats are raised in that district, and it is commonly believed that the Angora goat and its wool degenerate when transported. Probably this is only an invention of the shepherds to prevent rivals from attempting to interfere with so profitable a monopoly. But if the popular prejudice has any foundation, the degeneracy is doubtless to be attributed to ignorance of the special treatment which long experience has taught the Angora shepherds, and the consequent neglect of such precautions as are necessary to the proper care of the animal. Throughout nearly the whole territory of the United States the success of the Angora goat is perfect, and it would undoubtedly thrive equally well in Italy, though it is very doubtful whether in either country the value of its fleece would compensate the damage it would do to the woods.] The yak, or Tartary ox, seems to thrive in France, and it is hoped that success will attend the present efforts to introduce the South American alpaca into Europe. [Footnote: The reproductive powers of animals, as well as of plants, seem to be sometimes stimulated in an extraordinary way by transfer to a foreign clime. The common warren rabbit introduced by the early colonists into the island of Madeira multiplied to such a degree as to threaten the extirpation of vegetation, and in Australia the same quadruped has become so numerous as to be a very serious evil. The colonists are obliged to employ professional rabbit-hunters, and one planter has enclosed his grounds by four miles of solid wall, at an expense of $6,000, to protect his crops against those ravagers.--Revue des Eaux et Forets, 1870, p. 38.]
According to the census of the United States for 1870, [Footnote: In the enumeration of farm stock, "sucking pigs, spring lambs, and calves," are omitted. I believe they are included in the numbers reported by the census of 1860. Horses and horned cattle in towns and cities were excluded from both enumerations, the law providing for returns on these points from rural districts only. On the whole, there is a diminution in the number of all farm stock, except sheep, since 1860. This is ascribed by the Report to the destruction of domestic quadrupeds during the civil war, but this hardly explains the reduction in the number of swine from 39,000,000 in 1800 to 25,000,000 in 1870.] the total number of horses in all the States of the American Union, was, in round numbers, 7,100,000; of a.s.ses and mules, 1,100,000; of the ox tribe, 25,000,000; of sheep, 28,000,000; and of swine, 25,000,000. The only indigenous North American quadruped sufficiently gregarious in habits, and sufficiently multiplied in numbers, to form really large herds, is the bison, or, as he is commonly called in America, the buffalo; and this animal is confined to the prairie region of the Mississippi basin, a small part of British America, and Northern Mexico. The engineers sent out to survey railroad routes to the Pacific estimated the number of a single herd of bisons seen within the last fifteen years on the great plains near the Upper Missouri, at not less than 200,000, and yet the range occupied by this animal is now very much smaller in area than it was when the whites first established themselves on the prairies. [Footnote: "About five miles from camp we ascended to the top of a high hill, and for a great distance ahead every square mile seemed to have a herd of buffalo upon it. Their number was variously estimated by the members of the party; by some as high as half a million. I do not think it any exaggeration to set it down at 200,000." Steven"s Narrative and Final Report. Reports of Explorations and Surveys for Railroad to Pacific, vol xii, book i., 1860.
The next day the party fell in with a "buffalo trail," where at least 100,000 were thought to have crossed a slough.
As late as 1868, Sheridan"s party estimated the number of bisons seen by them in a single day at 200,000.--Sheridan"s Troopers on the Border, 1868, p. 41.] But it must be remarked that the American buffalo is a migratory animal, and that, at the season of his annual journeys, the whole stock of a vast extent of pasture-ground is collected into a single army, which is seen at or very near any one point only for a few days during the entire season. Hence there is risk of great error in estimating the numbers of the bison in a given district from the magnitude of the herds seen at or about the same time at a single place of observation; and, upon the whole, it is neither proved nor probable that the bison was ever, at any one time, as numerous in North America as the domestic bovine species is at present. The elk, the moose, the musk ox, the caribou, and the smaller quadrupeds popularly embraced under the general name of deer, though sufficient for the wants of a spa.r.s.e savage population, were never numerically very abundant, and the carnivora which fed upon them were still less so. It is almost needless to add that the Rocky Mountain sheep and goat must always have been very rare.
Summing up the whole, then, it is evident that the wild quadrupeds of North America, even when most numerous, were few compared with their domestic successors, that they required a much less supply of vegetable food, and consequently were far less important as geographical elements than the many millions of hoofed and horned cattle now fed by civilized man on the same continent.
EXTIRPATION OF WILD QUADRUPEDS.
Although man never fails greatly to diminish, and is perhaps destined ultimately to exterminate, such of the larger wild quadrupeds as he cannot profitably domesticate, yet their numbers often fluctuate, and oven after they seem almost extinct, they sometimes suddenly increase, without any intentional steps to promote such a result on his part.
During the wars which followed the French Revolution, the wolf multiplied in many parts of Europe, partly because the hunters were withdrawn from the woods to chase a n.o.bler game, and partly because the bodies of slain men and horses supplied this voracious quadraped with more abundant food. [Footnote: During the late civil war in America, deer and other animals of the chase multiplied rapidly in the regions of the Southern States which were partly depopulated and deprived of their sportsmen by the military operations of the contest, and the bear is said to have reappeared in districts where he had not been seen in the memory of living man.] The same animal became again more numerous in Poland after the general disarming of the rural population by the Russian Government. On the other hand, when the hunters pursue the wolf, the graminivorous wild quadrupeds increase, and thus in turn promote the multiplication of their great four-footed destroyer by augmenting the supply of his nourishment. So long as the fur of the beaver was extensively employed as a material for hats, it bore a very high price, and the chase of this quadruped was so keen that naturalists feared its speedy extinction. When a Parisian manufacturer invented the silk hat, which soon came into almost universal use, the demand for beavers" fur fell off, and the animal--whose habits are an important agency in the formation of bogs and other modifications of forest nature--immediately began to increase, reappeared in haunts which he had long abandoned, and can no longer be regarded as rare enough to be in immediate danger of extirpation. Thus the convenience or the caprice of Parisian fashion has unconsciously exercised an influence which may sensibly affect the physical geography of a distant continent.
Since the invention of gunpowder, gome quadrupeds have completely disappeared from many European and Asiatic countries where they were formerly numerous. The last wolf was killed in Great Britain two hundred years ago, and the bear was extirpated from that island still earlier.
The lion is believed to have inhabited Asia Minor and Syria, and probably Greece and Sicily also, long after the commencement of the historical period, and he is even said to have been not yet extinct in the first-named two of these countries at the time of the first Crusade.
[Footnote: In maintaining the recent existence of the lion in the countries named in the text, naturalists have, perhaps, laid. too much weight on the frequent occurrence of representations of this animal in sculptures apparently of a historical character. It will not do to argue, twenty centuries hence, that the lion and the unicorn were common in Great Britain in Queen Victoria"s time because they are often seen "fighting for the crown" in the carvings and paintings of that period.
Many paleontolgists, however, identify the great cat-like animal, whose skeletons are frequently found in British bone-caves, with the lion of our times.
The leopard (panthera), though already growing scarce, was found in Cilicia in Cicero"s time. See his letter to Coelius, Epist. ad Diversos, Lib. II., Ep. 11.
The British wild ox is extinct except in a few English and Scottish parks, while in Irish bogs of no great apparent antiquity are found antlers which testify to the former existence of a stag much larger than any extant European species. Two large graminivorous or browsing quadrupeds, the ur and the schelk, once common in Germany, have been utterly extirpated, the eland and the auerochs nearly so. The Nibelungen-Lied, which, in the oldest form preserved to us, dates from about the year 1200, though its original composition no doubt belongs to an earlier period, thus sings:
Then slowe the dowghtie Sigfrid a wisent and an elk, he smote four stoute uroxen and a grim and st.u.r.die schelk. [Footnote: Dar nach sluoger schiere, einen wisent unde elch. Starker ure viere, unt einen grimmen schelch. XVI. Aventiure.
The testimony of the Nibelungen-Lied is not conclusive evidence that these quadrupeds existed in Germany at the time of the composition of that poem. It proves too much; for, a few lines above those just quoted, Sigfrid is said to have killed a lion, an animal which the most patriotic Teuton will hardly claim as a denizen of mediaeval Germany.]
Modern naturalists identify the elk with the eland, the wisent with the auerochs. The period when the ur and the schelk became extinct is not known. The auerochs survived in Prussia until the middle of the last century, but unless it is identical with a similar quadruped said to be found on the Caucasus, it now exists only in the Russian imperial forest of Bialowitz where about a thousand are still preserved, and in some great menageries, as for example that at Schonbrunn, near Vienna, which, in 1852, had four specimens. The eland, which is closely allied to the American wapiti if not specifically the same animal, is still kept in the royal preserves of Prussia, to the number of four or five hundred individuals. The chamois is becoming rare, and the ibex or steinbock, once common in all the high Alps, is now believed to be confined to the Cogne mountains in Piedmont, between the valleys of the Dora Baltea and the Orco, though it is said that a few still linger about the Grandes Jora.s.ses near Cormayeur.
The chase, which in early stages of human life was a necessity, has become with advancing civilization not merely a pa.s.sion but a dilettanteism, and the cruel records of this pastime are among the most discreditable pages in modern literature. It is true that in India and other tropical countries, the number and ferocity of the wild beasts not only justify but command a war of extermination against them, but the indiscriminate slaughter of many quadrupeds which are favorite objects of the chase can urge no such apology. Late official reports from India state the number of human victims of the tiger, the leopard, the wolf and other beasts of prey, in ten "districts," at more then twelve thousand within three years, and we are informed on like authority that within the last six years more than ten thousand men, women, and children have perished in the same way in the Presidency of Bengal alone. One tiger, we are told, had killed more than a hundred people, and finally stopped the travel on an important road, and another had caused the desertion of thirteen villages and thrown 250 square miles out of cultivation. In such facts we find abundant justification of the slaying of seven thousand tigers, nearly six thousand leopards, and twenty-five hundred other ravenous beasts in the Bengal Presidency, in the s.p.a.ce of half a dozen years. But the humane reader will not think the value of the flesh, the skin, and other less important products of inoffensive quadrupeds a satisfactory excuse for the ravages committed upon them by amateur sportsmen as well as by professional hunters. In 1861, it was computed that the supply of the English market with ivory cost the lives of 8,000 elephants. Others make the number much larger and it is said that half as much ivory is consumed in the United States as in Great Britain. In Ceylon, where the elephants are numerous and destructive to the crops, as well as dangerous to travellers, while their tusks are small and of comparatively little value, the government pays a small reward for killing them. According to Sir Emerson Tennant, [Footnote: Natural History of Ceylon, chap. iv.] in three years prior to 1848, the premium was paid for 3,500 elephants in a part of the northern district, and between 1851 and 1856 for 2,000 in the southern district.
Major Rogers, famous as an elephant shooter in Ceylon, ceased to count his victims after he had slain 1,300, and c.u.mming in South Africa sacrificed his hecatombs every month.
In spite of the rarity of the chamois, his cautious shyness, and the comparative inaccessibility of his favorite haunts, Colani of Pontresina, who died in 1837, had killed not less than 2,000 of these animals; Kung, who is still living in the Upper Engadine, 1,500; Hitz, 1,300, and Zwichi an equal number; Soldani shot 1,100 or 1,200 in the mountains which enclose the Val Bregaglia, and there are many living hunters who can boast of having killed from 500 to 800 of these interesting quadrupeds. [Footnote: Although it is only in the severest cold of winter that the chamois descends to the vicinity of grounds occupied by man, its organization does not confine it to the mountains.
In the royal park of Racconigi, on the plain a few miles from Turin, at a height of less than 1,000 feet, is kept a herd of thirty or forty chamois, which thrive and breed apparently as well as in the Alps.]
In America, the chase of the larger quadrupeds is not less destructive.
In a late number of the American Naturalist, the present annual slaughter of the bison is calculated at the enormous number of 500,000, and the elk, the moose, the caribou, and the more familiar species of deer furnish, perhaps, as many victims. The most fortunate deer-hunter I have personally known in New England had killed but 960; but in the northern part of the State of New York, a single sportsman is said to have shot 1,500, and this number has been doubtless exceeded by zealous Nimrods of the West.
But so far as numbers are concerned, the statistics of the furtrade furnish the most surprising results. Russia sends annually to foreign markets not less than 20,000,000 squirrel skins, Great Britain has sometimes imported from South America 600,000 nutria skins in a year.
The Leipzig market receives annually nearly 200,000 ermine, and the Hudson Bay Company is said to have occasionally burnt 20,000 ermine skins in order that the market might not be overstocked. Of course natural reproduction cannot keep pace with this enormous destruction, and many animals of much interest to natural science are in imminent danger of final extirpation. [Footnote: Objectionable as game laws are, they have done something to prevent the extinction of many quadrupeds, which naturalists would be loth to lose, and, as in the case of the British ox, private parks and preserves have saved other species from destruction. Some few wild aminals, such as the American mink, for example, have been protected and bred with profit, and in Pennsylvania an a.s.sociation of gentlemen has set apart, and is about enclosing, a park of 16,000 acres for the breeding of indigenous quadrupeds and fowls.]