Powerful voices have been raised of late in favour of the preservation of African wild life, and this especially in England. In this respect, Mr. Edward North Buxton is most prominent in pressing for thorough measures of protection for the African fauna, throughout the wide possessions or spheres of interest of the British Empire. In England, too, many strong pleas have been made in support of the view that even relatively speaking noxious animals should not be deprived by man of the right to a certain amount of protection. Thus Sir H. H. Johnston, the former Governor of the Uganda Province in Central Africa, says in his preface to the English edition of my book _With Flashlight and Rifle_, that in his opinion the weasel, the owl, and the primitive British badger of the existing fauna ought not to be entirely sacrificed to the pheasant--a beautiful enough bird, but, after all, one that must always remain an “interloper”; that the egret, the bird of paradise, the chinchilla, the sea-otter,[15] and such-like creatures are “æsthetically as important,” and have the same right to existence, as a woman beautifully dressed in the spoils of these animals. Good pioneer work in this direction must result from the noble-hearted resolve of the Queen of England to put herself at the head of the “Anti-Osprey Movement,” organised to save the royal heron from threatened extinction. There can be no doubt that the complete extermination of any species of animal must excite in the mind of a reflecting man a sense of injustice and wrong; and that this complete destruction of certain species can only be to the interest of all men in general when such animals, of whatever kind they may be, are entirely noxious and quite useless. No epoch in the world’s history can be set in comparison with ours in so far as it has been the witness, in the course of a few decades, of almost daily progress and improvement in connection with industry, culture, and the whole field of human knowledge. And, moreover, no epoch has been so penetrated with the great thoughts of progressive humanity. The continual employment--in ways that are ever more adroit, ever more complex--of all the resources offered by nature to man, seems at the same time to blind him to certain grave misdeeds that he is actually perpetrating every day. These great crimes against the harmony and order with which nature surrounds us--crimes that it is not easy to make any amends for--are the disfigurement and poisoning of watercourses, the pollution of the air, the laying waste of a portion of the plant world (namely, the forests), and the extinction of some of the animals that live with us.