The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-01-15

MN( v ASHINGTON, January A-eSpe-
 \WW ciaL) L)-Although the wild life Of
 North America is more abun- idant than that of the other continents of the northern hemisphere and has only Africa as a world rival, yet our present day richness in this respect is decidedly poor, compared with the abundance and variety of mammalian life that roamed our plains before the advent of the white man, while the vast number Of species which disappeared even before the Indians came to inhabit the land is even more astonishing.
 h a communication to the National of the United States Geological survey, gives an amazing account of North Amer ican wild life in prehistoric times A portion of the communication has been made public by the society in the follow ing bulletin:
 The original buffalo herds have been estimated to have contained from 30 OOo,OO0 to 6O,OOO,0OO animals (he latter fig ure is 6,000,000 greater than the total num- Der of cattle in the United States, &C., cordng to the census of 191O), and in 1870 it was estimated that about 5,5OOO0O still survived-exceeding by 1,4OOOO0 the num- Der of mules in the United States in 1910. A number of men now living were privileged to see some of the great herds of the west before they were finally de-
 
 In 1870, I happened to be on a train that was stopped for three hours to let a herd of buffalo pass. We supposed they would soon pass by, but they kept on coming. On a number of occasions in earlier days the engineers thought that they could run through the herds, and that, seeing the locomotive, the buffalo would stop to turn aside, but after a few locomotives had been ditched by the animals the engineers got in the way of respecting the buffaloes 1diosyncracies.
 Astonishing as was the number of buffalo which roamed the plains of old, even more numerous were the antelope, though the latter did not attract as much attention as the larger mammals. Be- sides these, the chroniclers of the colonial days give many interesting ac- counts of the incredible number of other wild animals. including bears, wapiti, white-tailed deer and turkeys on which the wolves made fierce war. One writer Il fully 2400 moose were snared on the Great Manitoulin Island at the head of Lake Huron
 ''The wealth of animal life found by our forebears was one of the great natu- ra. resources of the new world. Although freely drawn upon from the first, the stock was but little depleted up te within a century. During the last 100 years, however the rapidly increasing occupa- tion of the continent and other causes, together with a steadily increasing con1- mercial demand for animal products, have had an appalling effect The buff falo, elk and antelope are reduced to a pitiful fraction of their former countless numbers.
 Practically all other large game has alarrningly decreased and its extermina- ton has been partly stayed only by the recent enforcement of protective laws
 The recent great abundance of large land mammals in North America, both in individuals and species, is in striking contrast with their scarcity in South America, the difference evidently being due to the long isolation of the southern continent from other land masses. whence it might have been restocked after the loss of a formerly existing fauna.