in the Animallai Hills where thirty-five years ago
there modestly nestled on the ridge beside the river only Forest Ranger
Theobold's bungalow, built of mud and covered with grass thatch and
bamboo rats, there is now a regular hill station lighted by electricity,
a modern sanatorium high up on the bluff, a _club_, golf links, and
other modern improvements. In my day there were exactly four guns on the
Animallais. Now there are probably one hundred; and it is easy to guess
how much big game remains on the Delectable Mountains in comparison with
the golden days of 1877. I should say that there is now only one game
animal for every twenty-five that were there in my day.

I am told that it is like that all over India. Beyond question, the
gun-sellers and gun-users have been busy there, as everywhere else. The
game of India is on the toboggan slide, and the old days of abundance
have gone forever.

The first fact that strikes us in the face is the impending fate of the
great Indian rhinoceros, an animal as wonderful as the Titanothere or
the Megatherium. It is like a gift handed down to us straight out of the
Pleistocene age, a million years back. The British paleontologists
to-day marvel at _Elephas ganesa_, and by great labor dig his bones out
of the Sewalik rocks, but what one of them all has yet made a move to
save _Rhinoceros indicus_ from the quick extermination that soon will be
his portion unless he is accorded perpetual and real protection from the
assaults of man?

Let the mammalogists of the world face this fact. The available cover of
the Indian rhinoceros is _alarmingly_ decreasing, throughout Assam and
Bengal where the behemoth of the jungle has a right to live. It is
believed that the few remaining rhinos are being shot much faster then
they are breeding; and what will be the effect of this upon an animal
that requires fourteen years to reach full maturity? To-day, the most
wonderful hoofed mammal of all Asia is booked for extermination, and
unless very radical measures for its preservation are at once carried
into effect, it is probable that twenty years more will see the last
Indian rhino go down to rise no more. One remedy would be a good, ample
rhinoceros preserve; and another, the most absolute and permanent
protection for the species, all along the line. Half-way measures will
not suffice. It is time to ring in a general alarm.

During the past eighteen years, only three specimens of that species
ha