tion by
them is concerned, they are only one remove from mounted museum
specimens. This parrakeet is the only member of its order that ranged
into the United States during our own times, and with its disappearance
the Order Psittaciformes totally disappears from our country.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

THE NEXT CANDIDATES FOR OBLIVION

In the world of human beings, murder is the most serious of all crimes.
To take from a man that which no one ever can restore to him, his life,
is murder; and its penalty is the most severe of all penalties.

There are circumstances under which the killing of a wild animal may be
so wanton, so revolting and so utterly reprehensible that the act may
justly be classed as murder. The man who kills a walrus from the deck of
a steamer that he knows will not stop; the man who wantonly killed the
whole colony of hippopotami that Mr. Dugmore photographed in life; the
man who last winter shot bull elk in Wyoming for their two ugly and
shapeless teeth, and the man who wantonly shot down a half-tame deer
"for fun" near Carmel, Putnam County, New York, in the summer of
1912,--all were guilty of _murdering_ wild animals.

The murder of a wild animal species consists in taking from it that
which man with all his cunning and all his preserves and breeding can
not give back to it,--its God-given place in the ranks of Living Things.
Where is man's boasted intelligence, or his sense of proportion, that
every man does not see the monstrous moral obliquity involved in the
destruction of a species!

If the beautiful Taj Mehal at Agra should be destroyed by vandals, the
intelligent portion of humanity would be profoundly shocked, even though
the hand of man could at will restore the shrine of sorrowing love.
To-day the great Indian rhinoceros, certainly one of the most wonderful
four-footed animals still surviving, is actually being exterminated; and
even the people of India and England are viewing it with an indifference
that is appalling. Of course there are among Englishmen a great many
sportsmen and several zoologists who really care; but they do not
constitute one-tenth of one per-cent of the men who ought to care!

In the museums, we stand in awe and wonder before the fossil skeleton of
the Megatherium, and the savants struggle to unveil its past, while the
equally great and marvelous _Rhinoceros indicus_ is being rushed into
oblivion. We marvel at the fossil sh