state, I am forgetting that such hardly any longer exist. The great herds of bisons, zebras, antelopes, giraffes, etc., that once roamed over places now given over to humanity (and inhumanity) have disappeared, and what have we learnt from them? Who has watched them—at least very carefully or patiently—with thoughts other than of their slaughter? I know of no careful record of their movements, taken from hour to hour and from day to day. A few generalities, conveying some of the more obvious and striking facts—or what seemed to be so—will alone survive their extinction. Enlightened curiosity has been drowned in bloodthirstiness, and the coarse pleasure of killing has over-ridden in us the higher ones of observation and inference. We have studied animals only to kill them, or killed them in order to study them. Our "zoologists" have been thanatologists. Thus the knowledge gleaned even by the sportsman-naturalist has been scant and bare, for—besides that the proportions of the mixture are generally as Falstaff and Falstaff's page—there is little to be seen between the sighting of the quarry and the crack of the rifle. Observation has commonly left off just where it should have begun.
Had we as often stalked animals in order to observe them, as we have in order to kill them, how much richer might be our knowledge!
