NOTE D OUR WASTE LAND IN MASHONALAND (1891)

At the present day it is by no means uncommon for men to spend the greater part of their lives and large stores of wealth in a sometimes futile search for the scattered fragments of antiquity. A few broken Greek marbles, or Nineveh mud tablets, or battered leaves of Egyptian papyrus, are considered an ample return for half a lifetime of labour and the expenditure of thousands. We are apt to regard with a scorn not unmixed with malevolence the men of a bygone age who allowed treasure of so priceless a value to humanity to be wantonly destroyed.

Yet, at the present day in South Africa, a destruction of materials far more priceless and irrevocable goes on in our midst in the full light of our nineteenth-century humanitarian culture. It is possible that in the course of time a new Phidias may arise in our midst, and produce statues comparable to, if not identical with, those of the old world, and the learning and lore of the old Egyptians and Chaldeans lost in their destroyed mud tablets or papyrus leaves may yet be re-evolved from the human brain; but there is a reckless and callous destruction now going on in our midst of that which can by no conceivable possibility be restored to humanity when once it is destroyed from the surface of the globe. Future generations will probably regard as intelligent and wise benefactors of their race the men who burnt the Library in Alexandria, and destroyed the Parthenon at Athens, when they are compared, in certain aspects, with the inhabitants of Southern Africa and the modern world.

For the moment we are so entirely bent on advancing the claims of a material civilization, which we are inclined to regard as the all-in-all of life, that more subtle, if equally practical, and important considerations are apt to be forgotten.

This view is forced on us when we consider the reckless and entirely wanton destruction of the one form of production for which the African continent, and more especially its southern portions, [394] stands pre-eminent among the world's divisions—our astonishing fauna.

From gorilla and grey parrot on the east coast, and chimpanzee on the west, to the endless varieties of antelope and pachydermatous quadrupeds which at one time overran the south, no part in the globe has been within the memory of man, and even still is, so rich in beautiful and rare forms of sub-human life; no other presents the same vast field for scientific research.

How quickly this condition of things is passing away the most rapid glance at the present condition of South Africa will show. Hardly a year passes away without some rare and interesting form of life becoming extinct. The hippopotami, elephants, and antelopes which once grazed on the shores of Table Bay have for a century not been seen there, and the vast herds which covered our up-country plains in the memory of those living have absolutely been extinguished, leaving nothing behind but a few horns and skins, the few last wandering individuals, who in the natural course of things will be exterminated within the next few years. Before the middle of the twentieth century is reached (probably much sooner) the rifle, the railway train and the plough will so entirely have modified the conditions of existence that not only all forms of life indigenous to Southern, but to Central and Tropical Africa will have passed away.

From a sentimental and emotional standpoint this is to be regretted, but there are deeper interests than the merely emotional and poetical at stake. In an age when the study of a single small, deep-sea creature of a form intermediate between the vertebrate and invertebrate orders has thrown a flood of light on our biological knowledge, and when the discovery of a few fossilized hoofs has helped to revolutionize our view of vital phenomena; when even the man in the street, perceiving the practical advantages which science has conferred on him, has ceased to jeer, and regards it with a certain vague, if unreasoning, respect, it is not necessary to dwell at length on the fact that the loss of these multitudinous forms of life, by crippling and limiting the field of scientific study, must inflict a direct and serious loss on human knowledge and progress. But perhaps it is only the man more or less interested in the results of scientific research who can fully appreciate the importance of preserving for the future all forms of natural life, from the lion and crocodile to the humblest wood-dove and fly.

Some years back, finding it necessary to gain what information was obtainable with regard to the domestic and social habits of the higher apes, we found that all the information to be obtained from the latest works on the subject amounted to little more than [395] nil; and that for a personal inspection of these creatures in their natural state three distinct journeys into separate and most inaccessible parts of the globe would be necessary.

We then proceeded to study the few isolated specimens to be found in the Zoological Gardens of Europe. We found a few crestfallen looking animals, transported at an immense cost from tropical Africa or elsewhere, necessarily confined in small, comparatively dark cells, kept alive by a continual expenditure of coal and artificial heat, and then rarely saved from consumption, and requiring the constant care and attention of an able-bodied man; they resembled as little, seated on their heaps of straw and coughing, the creature in its natural and active social condition amidst the sunshine of a tropical forest, as a mummy represents an ancient Egyptian. After a vast expenditure of money, less was to be learnt from them than might be gained with regard to a troop of South African baboons when watched for a few hours from behind the stones of a kopje.

Considering these things, the conclusion inevitably forces itself upon us that our position with regard to the study of animal life is yet far from an ideal one. With one-third the expenditure of energy and money which goes to form our half-dozen small zoological collections in Europe, a vast preserve for wild animals immeasurably superior to anything which exists for scientific ends might be formed and maintained in any tropical or sub-tropical country. Our small existing collections may serve to bring curious specimens under the eyes of scientific men, and subserve certain useful purposes; but for many forms of study they are absolutely futile, and as a means of keeping in existence specimens which would otherwise become extinct, they have no claim to consideration. The ideal zoological garden would be a vast tract of country in some tropical or subtropical region, where all creatures but those habituated to extreme cold would freely exist in a state of nature, limited only by mutual struggle; it should be a tract diversified, if possible, by swamp, forest, and hills, and divided as far as might be by natural features from the surrounding country; and where no such barriers existed it should be as far as possible artificially cut off. It should contain not merely the creatures indigenous to the country, but should serve as a receptacle for those which could not elsewhere be preserved from extinction. It should form, so to speak, a vast natural preserve, existing not primarily for the purposes of the sportsman, but of science, and in which the rifle should be almost unknown. In connection with this might in time spring up large zoological gardens in the narrower sense of the term, where isolated specimens might be immured for the purposes of certain studies; but for many years [396] its far more important function would be simply the keeping in existence a large number of forms of animal life which would else become annihilated. Wildly Utopian as this scheme appears at first sight, consideration will show it is not beyond the range of feasibility, though beset with difficulty. The first, and for many years the most insuperable, difficulty has lain in the fact that no such tract as was necessary was obtainable anywhere. The existence of a strong, civilized government would be necessary to guarantee its retention for the desired purpose, and where a civilized government exists, there, as a rule, is a more or less dense population. The individual, as a rule, precedes the government, and apart from the fact that land then becomes too precious to be appropriated for such a purpose, both the land and the fauna have, as a rule, become so much modified and destroyed that it would take half a century to reproduce natural conditions. Such considerations have made in the past the whole scheme appear purely Utopian.

At the present moment, however, there exists in South Africa, by a rare and exceptional combination of circumstances, a condition which removes it from the realm of the purely ideal to that of the remotely practical. The sudden and unprecedented movement of the north-east of Southern Africa, where a powerful and well-organized form of civilized government is rapidly establishing itself in a vast territory, sparsely inhabited by natives, and as yet little, or at all, by Europeans, and where certain low-lying tracts are not at the present moment fitted for immediate occupation or for ordinary cultivation, and will certainly not be so used till the immense tracts of salubrious and valuable land about them have been fully utilized, yields a possibility of the realization of this plan, which has not occurred before and will probably not occur again. Were a large tract of this country granted or bought at a nominal price, and freedom from intrusion guaranteed, and were the interests of scientific Europe and America aroused and directed to this matter, and a body of scientific men and practical travellers formed for the direction and management of the scheme, it might pass into the region of the practical and obtainable. Innumerable as the smaller difficulties of detail would be, they would probably not be insurmountable. Such a subsidiary difficulty, for instance, would rise from the fact that such a preserve should not border anywhere upon a densely populated tract of country, and that it would be necessary to leave a belt of country some miles in width around it, to be inhabited on exceptional conditions. Were the interest of scientific Europe and America fully aroused, and the feasibility of the scheme proved, money would not be the thing wanting for its completion.

The sum now expended in warming the cell of one anthropoid [397] ape in Europe would build a stone wall a mile long in Mashonaland, and did the contributions take the form of donations giving the donors a permanent interest in the scheme and its management they might be largely increased. Apart entirely from the noblest scientific aspect, the undertaking might in the end prove itself successful in the purely commercial sense. Not only would the existence of such a preserve serve in time, as the creatures became extinct elsewhere, to attract scientific visitors to the land; but (curious as such an idea now appears, in a country, where for years our struggle has been to obtain an initial control over the animal and vegetable productions of Nature, and where all artificial productions are naturally valued at something above their real worth) it is possible that the mere animals themselves might, in the course of sixty or eighty years, prove as lucrative a source of wealth to the scientific body to which they belonged as if the original capital had been invested in gold mines or corn fields. It is difficult at the present moment to realize that in a generation and a half, when streams of immigration have swept east and west, north and south, across the continent, the tusks of an elephant, the skin of an antelope, or the body of a giraffe, or a live lion, may possess a purely commercial value, which would cause them to equal in worth a handful of Kimberley diamonds or a claim at Johannesburg. Apart from the always increasing interest which would attach scientifically to such a preserve of primitive forms, the vulgar curiosity which to-day runs after the lion-van and stands gaping at the Zoological Gardens on a Saturday afternoon, would find its gratification in the products of the tract; and it is not impossible that in a future generation, if the crude thirst for destruction remains unslaked in human nature, Nimrods may be found who would gladly expend much of their superfluous wealth in paying for attaining to the blissful consciousness of having destroyed the life of a creature of whose kind only a few score exist in the world. It may be objected that were such a scheme workable, and however remotely a possible success, it would long since in a commercial age have been grasped and carried out. But a scheme whose monetary success cannot be looked for during the limits of a lifetime is not one which presents seductive allurements to the purely commercial investor. It is a scheme peculiarly fitted to be worked out in the interests of science, which are practically indestructible and in the presence of which a thousand years are but as one day.

In Central and Southern Africa to-day primitive nature is making its last stand on the surface of the globe. It is here or nowhere that a minute relic of it must be retained for the civilized world of the future. If it be possible for any plan to be matured [398] and carried out for the preserving of our fauna, it will undoubtedly be regarded by men of the future as action along that obvious, practical, and rational line which it was impossible for us to avoid seeing, and much as we should regard the action of men who had saved for us the treasures of antiquity in sealed chest and buried chambers. If no such plan is maturable and workable during the next fifty years, science will permanently have lost great possibilities, and South Africa that which constitutes its greatest attraction. It is certainly not by persistently following in the steps of other divisions of the globe, but by resolutely grasping our own opportunities and striking out her own paths, that Africa can ever attain to her rightful position among the world's divisions.

At the present moment in the low-lying districts of Mashonaland, which till all the vast salubrious and productive tracts about them have been fully peopled and cultivated, will lie waste, we have one of the last, and probably the best, opportunities which will ever occur of finding a field in which we may preserve our rare and wonderful fauna. But to be successfully carried out the scheme should be worked on a colossal scale, and by the international interaction of all interested in science; our preserve should be the World's Zoological Garden.

Printed in Great Britain by UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS LONDON AND WOKING

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Inconsistencies in hyphenation and punctuation have not been corrected.

The book cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

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