GAME PRESERVATION AND THE TSETSE-FLY.
[To Too Enron or um "SrEorsrou.")
Sra,—Fortunately, like your correspondent Mr. Murray (Spectator, April 6th), I have no experience of Wm in relation to sleeping sickness. When I first started planting in the Shire Highlands in 1891 a large portion of the country was uninhabited owing to slave raids and tribal wars. It is now, owing to the protection afforded by the Government and the opportunities for work offered by the European cora- munity, thickly populated. The Tuehila plains and the Upper Shire Valley were both swarming with game of all sorts and infested with tsetse, and it was unsafe to pass horses and cattle across,—I have lost both from being "fly- stack," Should the sleeping sickness appear, which it probably will, and the game be protected, the reverse process may quite easily occur, and the country again swarm with game and fly and be denuded of people. The African native is, I admit, unlike the game, not beautiful, and only to a modified degree interesting, but he has the humble merit of being useful, and it is difficult to know how we are to get on without him. Should the sleeping sickness reach Nyasa, it will undoubtedly travel down to the Zambesi Valley and thence through the low-lying portions of Portuguese East Africa. As it is here that the larger proportion of the native labour for the Transvaal is recruited, the question will become interesting to large and important industries. I believe that experience goes to prove that it is not the buffalo only that is responsible for tsetse, but the larger game in general. Mean- time the oracles are dumb. Both Sir Patrick Manson and Mr. Austin must have much of interest to communicate—if they could only be persuaded to do so—to the readers of the
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