There can be no doubt that the complete extermination of any species of animal must excite in the mind of a reflecting man a sense of injustice and wrong; and that this complete destruction of certain species can only be to the interest of all men in general when such animals, of whatever kind they may be, are entirely noxious and quite useless. No epoch in the world’s history can be set in comparison with ours in so far as it has been the witness, in the course of a few decades, of almost daily progress and improvement in connection with industry, culture, and the whole field of human knowledge. And, moreover, no epoch has been so penetrated with the great thoughts of progressive humanity. The continual employment--in ways that are ever more adroit, ever more complex--of all the resources offered by nature to man, seems at the same time to blind him to certain grave misdeeds that he is actually perpetrating every day. These great crimes against the harmony and order with which nature surrounds us--crimes that it is not easy to make any amends for--are the disfigurement and poisoning of watercourses, the pollution of the air, the laying waste of a portion of the plant world (namely, the forests), and the extinction of some of the animals that live with us.
We do not shrink from the most _reckless_ exploitation of those forests that have come down to us from the primeval past--the vast stores of coal buried deep in the bosom of the earth. The expert can now calculate with certainty that in a few hundred, at the very farthest in a thousand, years these stores will be exhausted. When it comes to this, the triumphant progress of industrial science will no doubt give us some substitute, perhaps even something better; but no technical knowledge, no science, can ever give us back anew those highly developed organisms of the plant and animal world which man to-day is recklessly sweeping out of the list of living things. They cannot restore to us the green woods and their animal life. We preserve with punctilious precision every vestige of the art of the past. The older the documents of earlier historic times are, the more eagerly they are coveted, the more highly they are valued. Our collectors gladly pay the largest sums for an old papyrus, an old picture, an object of decorative art, or a marble statue. And, as has been rightly remarked, what warrant have we that some new Phidias, some new Michael Angelo, some new Praxiteles will not arise, and give us something of as high value as these, or even much more perfect? Unreservedly to deny this would be the same thing as to give the lie to the progress of the human race.