On 26th June, 1689, an English youth, named Henry Kelsey, and an Indian boy set out northwards on a month-long journey from a newly-founded trading post at the mouth of the Churchill River in Hudson Bay. Their object was to find Indians who might bring furs to the new post, but they hiked an estimated 200 miles out and back over the Barrens without meeting a single human being. If, however, their trip was commercially a fruitless, as well as an arduous enterprise, they still made one discovery of some scientific interest. On Sunday, 9th July, Kelsey recorded in his diary: “in ye Evening spyed two Buffillo left our things & pursued ym Kill'd one they are ill shapen beast their Body being bigger than an ox leg & foot like ye same but not half so long a [long] neck & head a hog their Horns not growing like other Beast but joyn together upon their forehead & so come down ye side of their head & turn up till ye points be Even wth ye Buts their Hair is near a foot long” (Doughty and Martin, 1929, pp. 27–8).

I will begin by admitting how slight is my own first-hand knowledge of the three species except for the great one-horned rhinoceros with which I am, or was, fairly familiar during the thirty years that I spent in Bengal and Assam. Although the little two-horned rhinoceros was still said to exist in the Chittagong forests, while I was there at intervals between 1923 and 1930 I never saw even the tracks of this species until I went to Malaya in 1938. Even there, although I got to know its haunts reasonably well, I only caught two fleeting glimpses of the animal itself. As for the third species, the smaller onehorned rhinoceros, I have never even seen its tracks.

To understand the interior of British Columbia the reader must realize that the white man's history there is short, for Alex Mackenzie was the first white man to make his way overland to the Bella Coola Valley in 1793. Three years later, on his journey to the Pacific Ocean, he followed the Mackenzie River to Mackenzie Bay on the Beaufert Sea.

In South America there are many animals, such as chinchillas, coypus and armadillos, which have no near relatives elsewhere. Among them are the South American camelidae, which are not true camels but only camel-like. They have no hump, their ears are proportionately long and their tails short and bushy, but their slender build and long necks remind one of camels. Like camels, they walk on two toes or phalanges, on the last one, as do all artiodactyles, and also on the penultimate one, so that they seem to be rather digitigrades than unguligrades. Behind their relatively long claws, below the second phalange, there is a kind of little cushion which serves as a callous sole.

In form the vicuna resembles the guanaco, but it is smaller and slenderer. Its colour is not easy to describe and in South America people simply refer to “vicuña colour” which varies from pale fawn, through vermilion and golden to strongly fulvous. The vicuña has no black on its face as has the guanaco. From the throat to the knees there is a pure white tuft, the belly and inner sides of the limbs are white also. The vicuña stands from 28 to 35 inches (70 to 90 cm.) high at the shoulder, its average size decreasing from south to north. Its wool is shorter but much finer than that of the guanaco and is probably the finest and lightest wool in the world.

The balance of nature is an expression which is apt to be loosely invoked for all manner of purposes, but where wild life is concerned it is often used as an argument to prevent any alteration to an existing state of affairs. Man, however, in actual fact is ceaselessly upsetting the equilibrium of nature and almost every action of his upsets a natural balance, for instance, to mention but a few—developing agriculture, planting forests, cutting out forests, draining swamps, constructing dams and reservoirs, building great airfields or making new roads and railways. All this change is unavoidable and inevitable and no one can foresee the effect it is likely to have on the local wild life; sometimes the results are indeed remarkable. But the narrower interpretation of upsetting the balance of nature refers mainly to a situation in which there is for a variety of purposes the deliberate intent to alter the status of wild life, may be by the introduction of an exotic species, maybe by the elimination of a species already present. Such drastic changes can, though not necessarily, be fraught with considerable danger to the other species, and introductions into a favourable environment where natural enemies are absent or do not develop may result in the unimpeded and disastrous multiplication of the introduced species, such as the well-known examples of the rabbit in Australia, and the English sparrow in the U.S.A. So far my remarks have related to what can be termed an artificial alteration of nature's balance, oblivious of the fact that nature is not static and that nature itself is in a never-ceasing state of change. When I refer to nature not only do I mean the climate, the physical features, the forests, the vegetation and the wild life, but I include primitive man who always was and is, where he still occurs, part of nature. Primitive man filled his own little niche in the order of things, and with his primitive weapons and implements had little lasting effect on the zoological and botanical world around him.

(In 1953 Dr. Darling and Dr. A. S. Leopold conducted an investigation in Alaska on behalf of the Conservation Foundation and the New York Zoological Society. Their full report is reviewed on p. 334.)

Poaching.—A full-time resident ranger was appointed to this reserve in October, with instructions to ensure that every clause of the wild life protection ordinances was to be strictly enforced, to ensure the survival and increase of those animals that have survived years of snaring and hunting. The subsequent results have shown the necessity for his presence and afford ample proof of the good work he is doing.

The Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey has established and maintained a number of antarctic bases since 1945. They are located on the Graham Land peninsula, in the South Shetland and South Orkney Islands, and at South Georgia; over the years a great deal of general information about the various species of seals has accumulated. I have spent a total of thirty-six months in the Dependencies between 1948 and 1951 and some weeks in the Falkland Islands, occupied with a special study of the elephant seal, although opportunities were taken for work on other species. As a result we now have a fairly comprehensive picture of the status of the various pinniped species in this sector of the southern oceans.

To secure international action to stop oil pollution of the sea the British Government has invited some forty other maritime countries to send representatives to a conference in London in April. For years the pollution by oil of coastal waters and of the shores of Britain and other countries has been an expensive nuisance to humanity and has led to the lingering and horrible death of countless sea birds. It has now become intolerable. It is true that since 1922 discharge of oil within three miles of the coast has been legally prohibited and that in 1926 shipowners of many countries voluntarily adopted a 50-mile limit. Unfortunately little success has rewarded these efforts.

America's magnificent system of national parks and monuments is a tribute to one of the salient characteristics of the American people—a consciousness of civic responsibility to each other. In a culture often accused of being dollar-mad, some twenty-four million acres of the finest primeval land available has been reserved at the insistence of the people, to be protected inviolate for the benefit of future generations. In addition, fourteen million acres in the national forests have been set aside as Wild and Wilderness Areas, where no roads may be built, seventeen and a half million acres are devoted to federal wildlife protection and management, and many millions of acres are protected as state parks and privately owned sanctuaries. This is a proud achievement, attained because the people as a whole recognize that the wisest use of these lands is the perpetuation of their aboriginal condition, as representative of the once vast wilderness that clothed the continent.

The third technical meeting of the International Union for the Protection of Nature was held in Salzburg from 15th to 20th September, the last two days being occupied by excursions in which the majority of delegates took part. The term delegates is used though it is not strictly correct, for participants attended the conference as individuals only. Twelve countries were represented: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. Unfortunately there was nobody from the United States, a great supporter of the Union, but papers and information from America helped to fill this gap.

A study of the vegetation map of Tanganyika, Gillman, 1949, reveals three main plant associations. In the northern division the predominating vegetation is bush and thicket, wooded grassland and grassland. Here much Acacia country and scenery reminiscent of Kenya will be found. The other divisions are the western and south-eastern where the familiar catena—woodland, wooded grassland, valley grassland—is repeatedly represented.

As a result of the broken nature of much of Nyasaland and the diversity of its climate there is a correspondingly wide range of vegetation offering very varied habitats to wild life. From an alpine zone, containing giant lobelias on the Nyika Plateau and mountain grasslands with residual patches of broadleaved evergreen forest, occurring over all the plateaux above about 6,000 feet, the country drops into the Brachystegia woodland. This in its many forms covers most of the main watersheds of the country. The alluvial soils lying along the larger rivers on the plain of Lake Nyasa and down the Shire valley are characterized by mixtures of Acacia and Combretum species growing in grass which is long and intensely thick. Copaifera mopane woodland covers parts of the floor of the Shire valley, whilst on the poor sandy soils of the Lower Shire there are a number of patches of deciduous forests and thickets, some of which are virtually impenetrable except along paths made by the larger game animals. The only approach to open plains is found in the region of Lake Chilwa.