Fischer’s researches were of special importance in connection with the ornithology of Masailand.[1] His journey gave to science some thirty-six hitherto unknown species of birds. Such a result must indeed command our respect, when we consider the difficulties with which the traveller had to contend, and especially when we remember that his available resources were comparatively trifling, beside, for instance, the abundant help that was at the disposal of the English explorers of the same period. The Geographical Society of Hamburg rendered him the service of making the execution of his plans possible, and for the same object Fischer expended all the money he had earned in the active practice of his profession as a doctor on the island of Zanzibar. He saw the activity he had devoted to the service of scientific ideals richly rewarded by the results he obtained. And then he had soon to succumb to the treacherous climate. But if his life was cut short, how quickly the power of the Masai warriors was broken, the very power that had so harassed him, and made his journey so difficult and dangerous. That terrible scourge, the cattle plague, probably introduced from India, suddenly destroyed the greater part of the herds of the Masai, and at the same time blotted out vast numbers of the Masai themselves from the list of the living. [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ A _memento mori_ OF THE AFRICAN VELT.] * * * * * [Illustration: DWARF GAZELLES ON THE VELT. IN THE EDDYING WAVES OF DAZZLING LIGHT ONE COULD NOT KEEP ONE’S EYES OPEN FOR MORE THAN A SECOND AT A TIME.] The fates of these pastoral people and of their property (the countless herds of cattle) were so closely bound together, and these warlike herdsmen had become so dependent on their droves of cattle, that once these were ruined they could not survive, but died in a few days of famine. In the lapse of little more than a year the cattle plague and the Black Death had swept over the Masai uplands. Hungry vultures hovered over scenes of horror. The herds of cattle fell under the strange pestilence. Agonised by slow starvation, the herdsmen followed them to death. I have often found lying together, in one narrow space, the countless white bleached bones of the cattle and the skull of their former owner. It would be an old camping-ground, with its fence of thorns (zereba) long rotted away, and it was now a strangely impressive Golgotha. These heaps of bones, still to be seen in 1897, were soon after dissolved in dust and scattered by the winds. Where are the Masai of those days? Suddenly they stand boldly before me, as if they had sprung up out of the ground! It is no illusion. But why do my bearers show no fear? Why does no uproar break out in the camp? [Illustration: _C. G. Schillings, phot._ MASAI HERDSMEN.]