y. So far as danger
to man is involved by their presence, the experience in the Yellowstone
National Park is that there is no such danger; when allowed to do so,
they draw their rations as meekly as a converted Apache; if they err at
all, it is on the side of exaggerated and rather pitiful humility.

It is mainly with the deer, however, that we are concerned. It is out of
the question for any thinking man who takes the slightest interest in
these creatures to stand passively by and permit them to be
exterminated. To prevent such a catastrophe proper measures must be
taken. The hunting community increases with as great rapidity as that
with which game decreases. Where one man hunted twenty-five years ago, a
score hunt for big game to-day. Unfortunately it has become the
fashion. It is a diversion involving no danger and, for those that
understand it, but slight hardship. If people are to continue to have
this source of amusement, some well matured and concerted plan must be
devised to insure the continuance of game. Never in the past history of
the world has man held at his command the same potential control of wild
beasts as now, the same power to concentrate against them the forces of
science. Man's supremacy has advanced by leaps and bounds, while the
animal's power to escape remains unchanged; all the conditions for their
survival constantly become more difficult. Man has, in its perfection,
the rapid-firing rifle, which, with the use of smokeless powder, gives
him an enormous increase of effectiveness in its flat trajectory. This
is quite as great an element of its destructiveness as its more deadly
power and capacity for quick shooting, since it eliminates the necessity
for accurately gauging distance, one of the hardest things for the
amateur hunter to learn. If man so desires, he can command the aid of
dogs. By their power of scent he has wild animals at his mercy, and
unless he deliberately regulates the slaughter which he will permit,
their entire extermination would be a matter of only a few years. Only
at the end of the last year we were told of the celebration in the Tyrol
of the killing, by the Emperor of Austria, of his two thousandth
chamois. Eight years ago this same record was achieved by another
Austrian, a Grand Duke. This was in both instances, as I understand, by
the means of fair and square stalking, quite different from the methods
of the more degenerate battue. At a single shooting exhibition of t