Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 January 1902 — Ivory at Antwerp. [ARTICLE]

Ivory at Antwerp.

Since 1895 Antwerp has held the first place in the world as the market for the importation and sale of ivory. It sold in the three months ending Oct. 30 last 180,000 pounds of Ivory, of which 146,000 pounds came from the Congo basin, now the largest source of this commodity; It is interesting to observe in the report of the last quarterly sales that 130,739 pounds, or nearly the entire quantity coming from the Congo, is classified as “hard ivory.” This means that most of the ivory now coming out of Africa is from animals not recently killed, but from those that may have been dead for years. In other words, the greater part of the ivory industry at this time has to do with ivory which traders are now collecting from the natives, which is not the result of recent hunting. Millions of dollars* Worth of this Ivory has undoubtedly been lost to commerce in the past century. Scarcely one upper Congo elephant hunter in a hundred, twenty years ago, attached any value whatever to the tusks, having no idea that ivory was worth lifting from the ground.