- mal skins mounted on sculptured bodies, with backgrounds
painted from the country itself. In this, which we hope will be an everlasting monument to the Africa that was, the Africa that is now fast disappearing, I hope to place the elephant group on a pedestal in the centre of the hall—the rightful place for the first animal of them all.
And it may not be many years before such museum exhibits are the only remaining records of my jungle friends. As civilization advances in Africa, the extinction of the elephant is being accomplished slowly but quite as surely as that of the American buffalo two generations ago. It is probably not true that the African elephant cannot be domesticated. In fact, somewhere in the Congo is a farm where fifty tame elephants, just as amenable as those in India, are at work. But taming elephants is not a sound proposition economically. Elephant farming is a prince's game, and Africa has no princes to play it. An elephant requires hundreds of acres of land, infinitely more than cattle and sheep and the other domesticated animals. So it is that as man moves on the land, the elephant must move off.
Moreover, African settlers are making every effort to hasten the process. Wherever the elephants refuse to be confined to their bailiwicks and annoy the natives by raiding their farms, the Government has appointed official elephant killers. The South African elephant in the Addoo bush was condemned to be exterminated several years ago. Here, however, the hunters sent into the bush to kill them off found the
