The wealth of animal life found by our forebears was one of the great natural resources of the New World. Although freely drawn upon from the first, the stock was but little depleted up to within a century. During the last one hundred years, however, the rapidly increasing occupation of the continent and other causes, together with a steadily increasing commercial demand for animal products, have had an appalling effect. The buffalo, elk, and antelope are reduced to a pitiful fraction of their former countless numbers. [Illustration: Photograph by E. C. Oberholtzer COW MOOSE WITH HER YOUNG Notice the fold of skin at her neck resembling a bell.] WANTON WASTE OF WILD LIFE Practically all other large game has alarmingly decreased, and its extermination has been partly stayed only by the recent enforcement of protective laws. It is quite true that the presence of wild buffalo, for instance, in any region occupied for farming and stock-raising purposes is incompatible with such use. Thus the extermination of the bison as a denizen of our western plains was inevitable. The destruction, however, of these noble game animals by millions for their hides only furnishes a notable example of the wanton wastefulness which has heretofore largely characterized the handling of our wild life. A like disregard for the future has been shown in the pursuit of the sea mammals. The whaling and sealing industries are very ancient, extending back for a thousand years or more; but the greatest and most ruthless destruction of the whales and seals has come within the last century, especially through the use of steamships and bomb-guns. Without adequate international protection, there is grave danger that the most valuable of these sea mammals will be exterminated. The fur seal and the sea-elephant, once so abundant on the coast of southern California, are nearly or quite gone, and the sea otter of the North Pacific is dangerously near extinction. [Illustration: Photograph by W. J. Stroud ROCKY MOUNTAIN ELK They can hold their own in the mountains in summer, but when the deep snows come they are compelled to go down into the valleys. Just before they leave the big bulls travel the mountains from one end to the other, driving old and young before them into the lower country. In case of a hard winter the elk are thin and weak, and then the dreaded wolf makes havoc among them, especially the little calves.] [Illustration: Photograph by W. J. Stroud AN UNUSUAL ELK PICTURE] The recent great abundance of large land mammals in North America, both in individuals and species, is in striking contrast with their scarcity in South America, the difference evidently being due to the long isolation of the southern continent from other land-masses, whence it might have been restocked after the loss of a formerly existing fauna. [Illustration: Photograph by Charles E. Johnson THE MOOSE IS A POWERFUL SWIMMER] [Illustration: Photograph by F. O. Seabury