Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/364

350 in the first years of the present century they only existed in some unfrequented northern islands. For thirty or forty years past, not a single one has been seen anywhere. The great auk figures stuffed in some museums of natural history; it is now an object of priceless value. A bird of the size of a goose, having the upper parts of its body velvet-black, its throat shaded with brown, and its lower parts white, the auk presents zoological marks of peculiar interest; it is intermediate between the lesser auk, a flying bird, which visits our shores in winter, and the penguins of southern lands. The great auk formerly furnished the people of the north with a large part of their food. Steenstrup has found thousands of bones of these birds, gnawed, splintered, and scratched, among the famous refuse-heaps of Denmark and Norway which he has dug into with great service to information for history. In many places, penguins made the principal food of the ancient Scandinavians; later in time, these birds and their eggs, gathered by thousands in the breaks and crevices of the rocks, were a resource for sailors, and of all that abundance there remains nothing, absolutely nothing. Birds, as we see, have already lost many members of their family.

The destruction of the great animals, effected by men within a few centuries, leads us to anticipate a serious impoverishment of Nature in a more or less remote future. The extinction of a multitude of species has taken place with deplorable rapidity in the Mascarene Islands; it is going on in many other parts of the globe. Singularly, wherever European civilization penetrates, devastation begins, and sooner or later is completed. The most industrious nations are the greatest ravagers. A few thousand years more, and the whole earth will present a uniform and wretched appearance.

The facts we have just recalled, as to beings exterminated by man, lead the mind to reflections on the primitive state of our present world. In the Mascarene Islands, in New Zealand, a special fauna, entirely different from that of the countries nearest them, proves that these islands have remained isolated since the appearance of the animals that inhabit or did till lately inhabit them. The presence of birds unable to fly, or to defend themselves effectually in countries where no dangerous enemies are to be feared, is the indication of a regular assignment of organism to determinate locations, for one who does not believe in indefinite transformations perceptible only to the imagination. Finally, in seeing animals wanting effective means of locomotion established in limited ranges, we are led to believe that each species at first lived only on some very small part of the globe, and that the varying distribution of individuals results chiefly from the enlargement of locomotive powers.