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Show THE AMERICAN BUFFALO. Superintendent Wear of the;Yellow-! the;Yellow-! stone Park has made, his report for this year to the Secretary of the Interior. The report shows a satisfactory, condition of things in one important respect, namely, in the matter of game. The Park should never be allowed to be used as a hunting ground by any one, and the rules for the preservation of game should be most stringent Superintendent Wear reports that there are now in the Park some two hundred head of buffalo. These buffalo should be jealously -watched and cared for, as the, probabilities are that in less time than a century cen-tury the American bison will become extinct, and will be studied by naturalists natural-ists as a part of the fauna of the past and not of the living fauna. A quarter of a century ago the herds of buffalo which roamed nver the prairies were common, and their numbers incredible. In the days before the iron horse began his march from the Missouri to the Pacific, it was a common occurrence for the progress of wagon trains to be impeded by herds of buffalo ; but if one were to cross the plains to-day in a wagon the probabilities , are that such a traveler would not even see the footprint of the buffalo, much less the animal itself. And why is this' so? The march of civilization has necessarily driven the game before it and into remote parts of the country. Once Kansas was the home of the buffalo, but now he is not found within a thousand miles of her boundaries. As we said, civilization civiliza-tion naturally drives the buffalo into the remoter - and wilder parts of the country, but while this has tended to a decrease of the buffalo, the indiscrimirvto slaughter of the buffalo by the sportsman has been the chief cause for their almost extinction. The sport of hunting the buffalo degenerated into a mere wanton killing after all sport was gone, not even the hides being removed. The result has been "that now the buffalo are almost j gone, and even in America, their home, they will soon be as rare as African lions. We are glad there are some two hundred of them in the National Park, and we trust that it will be made a crime, to be punished severely, for anyone to kill them there. In fact it should not be permitted to anyone to kill game of any kind in the Park, and it should be made a genuine game preserve. |