Klipspringers:  About 11,200, in the following divisions, viz.:  Namaqualand, 6,559; Kuruman, 2,100; Steytlerville, 1,530; Oudtshoorn, 275; Hay, 250; Ladismith, 220; Graaff-Reinet, 119; Kenhardt, 66; and Cradock, 56.

Hartebeest:  About 9,700, principally in the divisions of Vryburg, Gordonia, Kuruman, Mafeking, Kimberley, Hay and Beaufort West.

Wildebeest:  About 3,450 in Vryburg, 80 each in Gordonia and Kuruman, 65 in Mafeking, 20 in Queen’s Town, and a few in the Bredasdorp divisions.

Eland:  About 12 in the Graaff-Reinet division, privately bred.

* * * * *

The above showing of the pitifully small numbers of the specimens that constitute the remnant of the big-game of the Cape suggest just one thing:—­a universal close season throughout Cape Colony, and no hunting whatever for ten years.  And yet, what do we see?

The Report from which the above census was taken contains half a column of solid matter, in small type, giving a list of the open seasons all over Cape Colony, during which killing may be done!  So it seems that the spirit of slaughter is the same in Africa that it is in America,—­kill, as long as there is anything alive to kill!

This list is of startling interest, because it shows how closely the small remnants of big game are now marked down in South Africa.

In view of the success with which Englishmen protect their game when once they have made up their minds to do so, it is fair to expect that the herds now under protection, as listed above, will save their respective species from extinction.  It is alarming, however, to note the wide territory covered by the deadly “open seasons,” and to wonder when the bars really will be put up.

To-day, Mashonaland is a very-much-settled colony.  The Cape to Cairo railway and trains de luxe long ago attained the Palls of the Zambesi, and now the Curator of the Salisbury Museum will have to search diligently in far off Nyassaland, and beyond the Zambesi River, to find enough specimens to fill his cases with representatives of the vanished Rhodesian fauna.  Once (1892) the white rhinoceros was found in northern Rhodesia; but never again.  In Salisbury, elands and zebras are nearly as great a curiosity as they are in St. Louis.

But for the discovery of white rhinoceroses in the Lado district, on the western bank of the Nile below Gondokoro, we would now be saying that Rhinoceros simus is within about ten specimens of total extinction.

From South Africa, as far up as Salisbury, in central Rhodesia, at least 99 per cent of the big game has disappeared before the white man’s rifle.  Let him who doubts this scan the census of wild animals still living in Cape Colony.