Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/56

44 and cacique birds which "possessed the qualities rarely found together, of melodious song and brilliant plumage. Toucans made the woods resonant with their sharp accents, which were mingled with the disagreeable cries of paroquets of numerous species and of red and yellow aras. . . . The woods resounded with the cadenced cries of the penelope and the hoecos; by means of his cry at a fixed hour the kamichi serves the Indians instead of a clock."

The abundance of mammals is still more extraordinary than that of birds. Livingstone speaks of a band of more than ten thousand euchoris antelopes. Delegorgue says, describing a meeting he had with these animals: "The dust flew and formed thick clouds in a hundred directions. Sometimes it rose in whirling columns to the height of one hundred or two hundred feet. . . . Immediately I perceived the innumerable troops of springboks which were raising these clouds. . . . The vision astonished me so that I had to question myself in order to be sure that it was not a vision. There were bands of from three to ten thousand individuals each, crossing one another's course at all points at once." The same traveler speaks also of large herds of gnus and elands; and he speaks of bands of a thousand or fifteen hundred buffaloes.

Allen, in his admirable work on the bisons of America, gives some curious details on the importance their herds once had and on their extinction. The 2,500,000 bisons that were killed between 1870 and 1875 would represent 50,000,000 in a century.

The solipedes abound in our epoch. Delegorgue saw bands of four or five hundred quaggas in Africa. Mr. Blanford says that Dr. Aitchison met a troop of one thousand hernionesheroines [sic] in Afghanistan. Brehm estimates, following Youatt, that the number of horses in all Russia is near 20,000,000 head. The rapidity with which horses left loose multiply in America is well known. Wild elephants are destined to be annihilated by man, but they are still numerous in some regions. Speke relates that when he was on the banks of the Nile, he found himself in the midst of a drove of several hundred elephants. Delegorgue estimates the number of elephants which he saw on a space about ten thousand feet in diameter in the Amazulu country at six hundred.

The rodents have a surprising force of propagation and multiply with the most astonishing rapidity. In 1863 a Mr. Austin took some rabbits to Australia for stocking his hunting grounds. The introduction of them was a disaster. They have so multiplied that thousands and thousands of acres of land have been ravaged, and thousands of men ruined. According to a report made three years ago, there are 20,000,000 rabbits in southern Victoria and northern Queensland. Brehm relates that 1,500,000 of field mice (Arvicola arvalis) were destroyed in fifteen days in the canton of Saverne, and that a factory in Breslau having offered a centime