Paintings, true to life, from the hands of artists, photographs taken directly from life, and finally these groups _awakened, as it were, to a new life_, are the means that can, and should, exert an educating and informing influence, so that all the beauty of this department of created nature may not be accessible only to a few learned men, but be open to all in general. If to an ever increasing degree this object finds support in influential circles, we shall thus obtain what must be somehow obtained. In the presence of the progress of industry and civilisation no one can indeed permanently prevent by protective measures the disappearance of certain species, even though we may hope to still delay the process of extinction by suitable regulations. But on this ground the duty that I have already indicated becomes more clearly imperative upon us. Its fulfilment cannot fail to be rewarded, in the case of all who take part in it, by the only true satisfaction that is given to mortals, the feeling of having done all that was in any way in our power to do. [Illustration: EGYPTIAN GEESE IN A SWAMP.] V Sport and Nature in Germany Not by far-away Lake Nakuro alone has “the Spell of the Elelescho” lived. It has lived, and still lives, all over the world; only that it goes by other names, and is linked with other symbols. In the brief summer of the Polar regions, battling with the snow and ice and the long night, it lives in the few stunted willows and the scanty reindeer-moss. It can only be fully understood where the ungainly walrus, the mighty Polar bear, coloured like his own snowfields, and the herds of fur-adorned musk oxen and reindeer give life to the wilderness, and millions of sea-birds cover the cliffs, or wheel shrieking through the air. To all these creatures the appearance of man in these wide regions is so strange and unaccustomed that they show no fear of him, and even come hurrying up from all sides to look curiously at this strange new being. In the high mountain regions of Central Asia, too, this spell survives, associated with the flocks of those timid creatures the primitive wild sheep, with the graceful wild goats, with the stately ibex,[24] and with the life and movement of the countless huge bears of the mountains, and with a strange flora that I myself have never looked upon, but of whose existence I am as persuaded as of that of the spell itself. It is to be found in the jungles of India, whence the tolerant natives have never driven it out. They have not expelled the animal world from its paradise. There in the region of the lotus-flower the spell may perhaps be recognised on still, moonlit nights. It survives everywhere: in the Australian bush, in the New and the Old World, on all islands, in all rivers and waters, in the life and movement of the waves and depths of the ocean, so full of secrets everywhere; in a word, where man has not yet driven it away.