years have passed without a living "record" of a wild specimen, it is
time to place a species in the class of the totally extinct.

_Extermination in a wild state_ means that the only living
representatives are in captivity or otherwise under protection. This is
the case of the heath hen and David's deer, of China. The American bison
is saved from being wholly extinct as a wild animal by the remnant of
about 300 head in northern Athabasca, and 49 head in the Yellow-stone
Park.

It is a serious thing to exterminate a species of any of the vertebrate
animals. There are probably millions of people who do not realize that
civilized (!) man is the most persistently and wickedly wasteful of all
the predatory animals. The lions, the tigers, the bears, the eagles and
hawks, serpents, and the fish-eating fishes, all live by destroying
life; but they kill only what they think they can consume. If something
is by chance left over, it goes to satisfy the hunger of the humbler
creatures of prey. _In a state of nature, where wild creatures prey upon
wild creatures, such a thing as wanton, wholesale and utterly wasteful
slaughter is almost unknown!_

When the wild mink, weasel and skunk suddenly finds himself in the midst
of scores of man's confined and helpless domestic fowls, or his caged
gulls in a zoological park, an unusual criminal passion to murder for
the joy of killing sometimes seizes the wild animal, and great slaughter
is the result.

From the earliest historic times, it has been the way of savage man,
red, black, brown and yellow, to kill as the wild animals do,--only what
he can use, or _thinks_ he can use. The Cree Indian impounded small