Five hundred years from now, when North America is worn out, and wasted to a skeleton of what it now is, the great plateau region of East Africa between Cape Town and Lake Rudolph will be a mighty empire, teeming with white population.  Giraffes and rhinoceroses now are trampling over the sites of the cities and universities of the future.  Then the herds of grand game that now make Africa a sportsman’s wonderland will exist only in closed territory, in books, and in memory.

[Illustration:  MAP SHOWING THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE LION Incidentally, it is also an Index of the Disappearance of African Big Game Generally.  From an Article in the Review of Reviews, for August, 1912, by Cyrus C. Adams, and Based Largely upon the Exhaustive Studies of Dr. C.M.  Engel, of Copenhagen.]

From what has befallen in South Africa, we can easily and correctly forecast the future of the big game of British East Africa and Uganda.  Less than fifty years ago, Cape Colony, Natal, Zululand, and every country up to the Zambesi was teeming with herds of big wild animals, just as the northern provinces now are.  As late as 1890, when Rhodesia was taken over by the Chartered Company, and the capital city of Salisbury was staked out, an American boy in the Pioneer Corps, now Honorable William Harvey Brown, of Salisbury, wrote thus of the Gwibi Flats, near Salisbury: 

“That evening I beheld on those flats a sight which probably will never again be seen there to the end of the world.  The variety deploying before me was almost incredible!  There, within the range of my vision were groups of roan, sable and tsessebi antelopes, Burchell zebras, [now totally extinct!] elands, reedbucks, steinbucks and ostriches.  It was like Africa in the days of Livingstone.  As I sat on my horse, viewing with amazement this wonderful panorama of wild life, I was startled by a herd that came galloping around a small hill just behind me.”—­("On the South African Frontier,” p. 114.)

That was in 1890.  And how is it to-day?

Salisbury is a modern city, endorsed by two lines of railway.  The Gwibi Flats are farms.  There is some big game yet, in Rhodesia south of the Zambesi, but to find it you must go at least a week’s journey from the capital, to the remote corners that have not yet been converted into farms or mining settlements.  North of the Zambesi, Rhodesia yet contains plenty of big game.  The Victoria Falls station is a popular starting point for hunting expeditions headed northeast and northwest.  In the northwest the game is yet quite in a state of nature.  Unfortunately the Barotse natives of that region can procure from the Portuguese traders all the firearms and ammunition that they can pay for, and by treaty they retain their hunting rights.  The final result will be—­extermination of the game.

Elsewhere throughout Rhodesia the natives are not permitted to have guns and gunpowder,—­a very wise regulation.  In Alaska our Indians are privileged to kill game all the year round, and they have modern firearms with which to do it.