Let us now follow a little more closely, under the guidance of English writers, the process of the extermination of the South African animal world. This lamentable work was completed very rapidly in the course of only something like a hundred years. From numerous English authorities, as well as from the publications of the Society already named, I have been able to ascertain that the last “blaauwbok” was killed by the Boers in Cape Colony about the year 1800. From extant sketches of this wild animal, it appears that it was a smaller species of the splendid horse-antelopes still to be found in other parts of Africa. During the following seventy-five years the extermination of several other kinds of animals was systematically carried out; and exactly eighty years later the last quagga, a kind of zebra (_Equus quagga_) was killed by the Boers. In England there is only one single specimen preserved, and that in a very poor condition. It is to be found in the British Museum. A further sacrifice to the advancing Europeans was the giant, wide-mouthed, “white” rhinoceros (_Rhinoceros simus_, Burch.), a mighty creature, that formerly ranged in thousands over the grassy plains of South Africa. The length of a horn taken from one of them is given as 6 ft. 9 in., English measurement! Even as late as the year 1884, a single trader was able to pile up huge masses, small hills, of these rhinoceros horns by equipping some four hundred tribesmen of the Matabele race with guns and ammunition and sending them out rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few specimens of this animal for the museums, and they are almost worth their weight in gold. Information lately obtained seems to indicate that a very small number of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five in all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible swamps in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on account of its deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. However, the Government of Natal has, I am pleased to say, made the killing any animal of this species, without legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of £300. An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William Cornwallis Harris, is an authoritative witness as to the extermination of wild animals in South Africa in 1836, though it must have been going on for a long time before that without any written record. The Boers must have slaughtered hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that date we have no first-hand written evidence on the subject.[18] Their proceedings were precisely of the same character as the events that have occurred in our own day in connection with the destruction of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and other animals throughout Africa. This destruction goes on silently, and only a few men who have a special knowledge of the circumstances bring some information about it to the world at large. The rest keep silence, and mostly have good grounds for so doing.