A correspondence concerning the rate at which the extermi- nation
of the African elephant is going on, has appeared within the last ten days in the Times. It seems that there are more wild elephants preserved in Cape Colony than in the great regions to the north where Captain Gordon Cumming slaughtered such prodigious numbers between 1848 and 1850. It is stated by Mr. Bryden in Tuesday's Times, that between 1875 and the present time, the value of the ivory imported into the Cape Colony from the regions north of the Zambesi has sunk from £60,000 annually to an in- significant sum hardly reaching a single thousand pounds. Yet there seems to be no reason at all, except the absence of any controlling authority, why the elephants should not be strictly preserved in the more northern regions, as they now are in the Cape Colony itself.
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