Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/351

Rh ox of Gaul and Germany, has been exterminated. The bison, the largest of mammals in modern Europe, is on the point of disappearing. The other wild ruminants are threatened with more or less remote extinction, and the local authorities in each country hardly understand the importance of checking a deplorable mischief which will soon be beyond remedy.

The history of the beaver is too well known to be repeated at length. A mammal of the highest interest from its habits, valuable for the products it yielded to commerce and manufactures, the beaver, the largest of our rodents, was abundant in France and a great part of Europe, down to the middle ages. In our day, its existence is almost questionable. For several centuries they have been seen only on the banks of the Rhone, or some affluent of that great river, and the few individuals observed in their solitude, far from being objects of special protection, have always been killed. It seems that quite lately a little family of beavers was discovered on an island of the Rhone; it was a piece of good luck, bringing the hope of seeing a nearly extinct species revive again in the country. They were all destroyed without mercy; such a piece of stupidity is possible among civilized people, when those who commit it do not even understand the wrong they are doing. At present beavers are hardly more common in the other parts of Europe than they are in France, and everywhere their buried bones, in mud and peat-bogs, remain the witness of those associations which were the wonder of animal life. In Canada, beavers almost identical with those of Europe were still quite generally found at no very remote time; but they have become extremely rare. Their destruction has been brought about very rapidly, through the cupidity of those great companies formed in North America in the last century for trading in furs.

Extermination, pursued in a senseless fashion, has not only fallen upon land mammals, but has been carried on as to marine species with even greater fury. The large animals of the sea gave rise to active industry and important commerce; but selfishness, and the love of gain, which forget the future in the present, have dried up that source. A century ago, the whale was the object of most profitable fisheries, and those huge cetacea are now so uncommon that their pursuit is given up by most of the nations that once grew rich by following it. Whalers were not content with the capture of old fish, but took younger ones, of very little value, as well as those full-grown. The satisfaction felt in depriving others of the possibility of a good catch two or three years later was too great to permit the reflection that success would thus soon become impossible for all whalers.

The rytina an herbivorous, cetaceous animal, belonging to the lamantin and dugong group, called sea-cows by the inhabitants of the coasts, was common a few hundred years ago in the latitudes of Behring's Islands. This animal, which attained a length of about