Staunton vindicator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1860-1896, 1892-10-07
s PAST ANIMAL LIFE.
wide FIELDS OF SPECULATION AND
INVESTIGATION.

Birds and Beasts That Are Now Extinct.
Creatures That Have Served Their Pur-
pose Should Not BE Mourned Because
They Are No More.
Is it necessary to go into paroxysms of
grief because certain animals are extinct,
States National museum, expresses it, are
threatened with exterminations" There
are more men and fewer wild animals
Mankind does not interfere SO much with
the survival of the fittest as it hastens the
destruction of the entire fauna. Formerly,
as Mr.. Lucas properly explains it, through
natural causes race after race Of ami
mails has disappeared from the globe
The determination of species by nature is
ordinarily slow, and the place of one is
taken by another, while the destruction
Wrought by man is rapid, and the gaps he
creates remain untitled
There was the great aux, an uncommonly
fat and awkward bird, that positively said
to hungry sailors, "Come, catch me- roast
and eat me-" Think of the godsend an
Alca impensis must have been, not alone
to primitive man, but to the early settlers
of Maine or Labrador. When Carriers
hardy mariners landed off Funk island in
1884 they made glorious Hastings on the
great aux. Here were poor fellows, dying
Of scurvy getting back vital forces with
every mouthful of great aux they swal-
lowed. Are they to be begrudged because
they ''filled two boats full of birds as if
they had been stones, so that, besides
them which we did eat fresh, every ship
did powder and salt five or six barrels Of
them"
Those Basque and other fishermen who
crossed the stormy seas for cod depended
on the luscious aux for their rations. The
number of the birds must have been count
less, because the aux was not prolific
breeder, laying only one egg at a time.
Poor, stupid old bird, shaped by nature to
become fat and heavy, to find it's food SO
readily that it wanted no wings, and SO
was killed!
1t might have lasted longer as bird if
it had not been for its feathers. Just as
soon as it was question of securing the
Care fowls feathers, then it was indeed
bound to disappear. Men went to their
UcSt OICCdlAS SlOuuu, WAlCA w eiS l. Ouh 10
land, and slew auks by the millions. All
that was done was to strip the birds
of their skins, and their bodies were left
to decay. Still the bird hung on as
rara avis up to 1910, and then it was no
longer an inhabitant of the world any
more than the dodo Could any of Car
tiers sailors have thought that skeleton
of q great aux, when offered for sale,
yvoy11A 70 he will mt
be worth $780, or skin fetch $3.50, or
fair eggshell 81 500?
When Columbus sought Copango and
came across the West Indies his sailors
found along the shores the seal known to-
day as the Monachus tropicalis. A distin-
guished characteristic of this seal was that
it placed little or no dependence on its hind
fiippers. Nature had overlooked or sighted
their dew elopment. It was seal without
proper coordination of movement. When
it wanted to go forward on the land it had
to arch its back something like a caterpil-
lar, and then after prodigious effort it's
progress was less than foot. OF course
with the advent of man this West Indian
was doomed.
The strange thing about this seal, SO far
as the collector is concerned, is this
although Monachus tropicalis was known
to have existed for several centuries, not a
single perfect specimen has fallen into the
hands of the naturalists. Dampier in 1875
told of the abundance of these seals and
wrote, 1.-The SpaniardS do often come
hither (Yucatan) to make oyl of their
fat" Sir Hans Sloan, who ten years after
Dampier visited the Bahamas, wrote that
these islands were filed with seals: Some
times fishers will catch 100 in night.
They try to melt them and bring of their
oil for lamps on the island" Perhaps the
last of these seals is existing today, for
some were taken as late as 1856, but i'll ten
years from now there will be no more of
Monachus tropicalis. It has served its
purpose.
In the Swamp, in New York city, that
quarter devoted to leather, one may oc-
casionally see two men lifting into a truck
what looks like heavy wooden plank,
only of greater width than is cut from
trees. The material is stiff and hard, and
if you strike it you can appreciate how
hard it is 1t is walrus hide, used for
buffing wheels, and it is about three inches
thick The walrus of the northern Pacific
is being exterminated for its tusks. hide
and oil. While whaling was profitable the
walrus was passed over, but to-day it is
too valuable. On the Atlantic side the
chances of the walrus still existing are
better, because it is much harder to get,
but when the Pacific walrus becomes rare
the Atlantic one will certainly be sought
for
Little or nothing is known today about
the rytina, OF arctic sea cow-the Rytina
gigas. It was related to the manatee, or
dugong, only it lived far north It was
big creature certainly twenty-five or thir-
ty feet long, with girth of from fifteen to
twenty feet, and probably an adult would
weigh four tons. 1t had ridiculously
small head and was toothless Its skin
was supposedly tough, not thick, but hard
enough to resist the edge of an ak. 1t was
gregarious and lived at the mouths of riv-
ers, pasturing OH seaweed. When Behring
n141) was in Kamchatka he saved his
crew from scurvy by taking sea cows. 1t
was a creature so easy to kill that exter-
mination soon took place.
On Copper island, where this sea COW
was once plentiful, they had become rare
in 1853. The last one was probably killed
On Behring island in the last quarter OF
The Eighteenth century. Some years ago,
Mt the instigation of the United States Ma
tional museum. DR.. Stejneger visited Behr-
ing island III search of sea COW skeletons
and was fortunate enough to find skulls,
ribs and other bones, and SO today No.
81 1856 of the catalogue of the National
museum stands for the skeleton of the sea
COW.
So much notoriety has been given to the
dodo that it is scarcely necessary to give
more than passing notice to Didus inep-
tus We generally accept Pisa's picture
of the dodo, but the confguration given it
by Savary in the Seventeenth century
comes nearer to what ornithologists be-
lieve to have been the true shape The
probability is thst after all the dodo was
not good bird to eat. In 1893, though it
had been fairly abundant in Madagascar,
Mauritius, Bourbon and Rodriguez, it was
extinct. The dodo owes its reputation to
the wonderful work done by Owen, who
reconstructed bird with few bones.--
New York Times.
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