supremacy has advanced by leaps and bounds, while the animal’s power to escape remains unchanged; all the conditions for their survival constantly become more difficult.  Man has, in its perfection, the rapid-firing rifle, which, with the use of smokeless powder, gives him an enormous increase of effectiveness in its flat trajectory.  This is quite as great an element of its destructiveness as its more deadly power and capacity for quick shooting, since it eliminates the necessity for accurately gauging distance, one of the hardest things for the amateur hunter to learn.  If man so desires, he can command the aid of dogs.  By their power of scent he has wild animals at his mercy, and unless he deliberately regulates the slaughter which he will permit, their entire extermination would be a matter of only a few years.  Only at the end of the last year we were told of the celebration in the Tyrol of the killing, by the Emperor of Austria, of his two thousandth chamois.  Eight years ago this same record was achieved by another Austrian, a Grand Duke.  This was in both instances, as I understand, by the means of fair and square stalking, quite different from the methods of the more degenerate battue.  At a single shooting exhibition of this latter sort by the Crown Prince of Germany at his estate in Schleswig, on one day in December last, were killed two hundred and ten fallow deer, three hundred and forty-one red deer, and on the day following, eighty-seven large wild boar, one hundred and twenty-six small ones, eighty-six fallow deer, and two hundred and one red deer.  Any man, private citizen as well as emperor or prince, has it within his power, if he be possessed of the blood craze, to kill scores and hundreds of every kind of game.  By the facilities of rapid travel the hunter, with the least possible sacrifice of time, is transported with whatever of luxury a Pullman car can confer (luxury to him who likes it) to the haunts and almost within the very sanctuaries of game.  Where formerly an expedition of months was required, now in a few days’ time he is carried to the most out-of-the-way places, to the barrens, the forests, the peaks, the mountain glades—­almost to the muskeg and the tundra.

How far the rage for hunting has captured the community in this country of the western seaboard it is surprising to learn.  In the year 1902 there were issued for the seven forest reserves south of the Pass of Tehachapi, a tract three-quarters the size of Massachusetts, four thousand permits to hunt.  Inasmuch as one permit may admit more than a single person to the privileges of hunting, it was estimated that at least five thousand people bearing rifles entered the reserves.  This besides the enormous horde of the peaceably disposed who also seek diversion here, and who naturally disturb the deer to a certain extent.  The supervisor of two reserves—­the San Gabriel and San Bernardino—­embracing a tract less than half the size of Connecticut, assured me that in 1902 sixty