The descriptions given by Harris, Oswell, Vardon, C. J. Anderson and their contemporaries give some idea of what enormous multitudes of wild creatures then wandered over the plains of South Africa. We are inclined to underestimate the abundance of the fauna of earlier epochs. The process of animal-destruction by the hand of man has been going on from immemorial times. For thousands of years man has been continually pressing the animal world back more and more, and it has had to give way in the unequal struggle. This process has been going on so slowly and so imperceptibly that it is only by the scanty remnants left from earlier times that we can form some estimate of the wealth that has disappeared. These are no empty fancies. All the lonely far-off islands of the world’s seas, the little visited Polar lands, and all the uninhabited steppes and wildernesses give us evidence of this. Not only from the lips of Cornwallis Harris, but also from some of his contemporaries, we have descriptions of the former abundance of wild life in the Cape districts of South Africa. At that time the country was, in the literal sense of the word, covered with countless herds of Cape buffaloes, white-tailed gnus, blessbock, bontebock, zebras, quaggas, hill-zebras, hartebeests, eland-antelopes, horse-antelopes, oryx-antelopes, waterbuck, impallah-antelopes, springbocks, and ostriches. Herds of hundreds of elephants were to be seen. Every marsh, every river-bed, was literally overcrowded with hippopotami. All other kinds of animals that are now so scarce, such as the large and handsome kudu, and all the different kinds of small wild animals, were to be met with in vast numbers. Although since the year 1652 South Africa had been to a continually increasing extent occupied by the Boers, all these wonderful things had managed to survive in rich profusion up to the moment when, about a hundred years ago, the great war of extermination began. Various causes contributed to bring this about: the increasing numbers of the settlers, their continual penetration farther and farther into the interior, and, above all things, the improvement of firearms. The natives, although very numerous in South Africa, had, as happens everywhere, left the animal life of the country in its abundance to the Europeans, who were overrunning the land in increasing numbers. It was reserved for these to bring the war of extermination to an end in a short time. Truly a melancholy spectacle!