Zanzibar is still the chief ivory market of the world, the supplies of both elephant and rhino ivory, so I was assured by British officials, steadily increasing rather than diminishing. A few years ago it was feared that the supply of ivory would soon run out, but the indiscriminate slaughter of elephants has been checked, at least in British territory, by strict game laws rigidly enforced. Whether from the laxity of its laws or the indifference of its officials, German East Africa is still the ivory-hunter's paradise, the extermination of elephants in that colony proceeding almost unchecked. When one remembers that African ivory brings all the way from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars per hundredweight in the open market, and that the tusks of a full-grown elephant weigh anywhere from one hundred to five hundred pounds, it will be seen that the ivory-hunter's trade is a profitable though a hazardous one. Other ivory-hunters, instead of going after the elephants themselves, spend their time in journeying from village to village and bartering with the natives for the stores of ivory—some of them the produce of centuries—which most of them possess. Unless the trader knows his business, however, the simple-minded natives will sell him the so-called “dead” ivory from the bottom of the pile rather than the “live” ivory of elephants recently killed, which, because of its greater elasticity and better colour, commands a much higher price, and, I might add, forms but a small part of the supply. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a million pounds of ivory are shipped from Zanzibar each year to make the toilet-articles and billiard-balls and piano-keys of the world.