The Audubon Societies 



481 



^A^ILLIAM BUTCHER APPRECIATED 



One of the pleasantest features of the 

 Annual Meeting of the Association, this 

 year, was having President William 

 Dutcher at all the sessions. His many 

 friends will be pleased to learn that he has 

 sufl&ciently recovered from his long illness 

 to be able to walk with the aid of a cane. 

 It is particularly proper at this time that 

 our readers should be presented with a 

 letter of appreciation from Abbott H. 

 Thayer, of Monadnock, New Hampshire, 

 who has been a life-long and intimate 

 friend of Mr. Dutcher, and who raised 

 the funds with which Mr. Dutcher began, 

 and for several years carried on, his 

 protection of nesting sea-birds at the 

 beginning of the present Audubon move- 

 ment. Mr. Thayer writes: 



"The later arrivals upon our field of 

 bird-preservation work, the younger gen- 

 eration who are just emerging into it, and 

 have in view so noble a corps of leaders to 

 follow, do not, probably, as a class, know 

 how great a debt they owe to William 

 Dutcher. 



"Through the first two-thirds of Mr. 

 Dutcher's life this thing was already 'in 

 the air,' and a good number of our best 

 Americans, Dutcher himself among the 

 number, did much local bird-preserving 

 on their own responsibility; but their life- 

 long experience of the general popular 

 indifference kept them hopeless of the 

 possibility of any wide-spread or more 

 centralized operations. The difference 

 between Dutcher and all the others was, 

 however, destined to come to light. One 

 day an inexperienced enthusiast went the 

 rounds of the principal members of this 

 group of bird-lovers, urging, with certain 

 grounds for hope, the attempt to enlist 

 enough wealthy supporters to establish a 

 system of wardens for the protection 

 of our sea-birds. Only Dutcher, among 

 them all, saw his way to do anything 

 about it. 



His life-work began on the spot. In him 

 alone blazed up such a flame of power and 

 devotion as only death can quell; he gave 

 the rest of his very life to preserving to 

 posterity the beautiful bird-world that he 

 so passionately loved. It is one thing to 

 wish a thing, and a very different thing 

 to wish it to the degree that makes one 

 give one's life for it. That is what he did. 

 The gigantic reforms needed throughout 

 the whole United States he no sooner 

 conceived than he undertook, although to 

 succeed against the marshaled hordes of 

 greed and time-honored custom meant his 

 personal presence in the halls of many 

 legislatures throughout the country, as 

 fast as his watchful eye saw the day com- 

 ing for the next iniquitous legislation. No 

 entreaties from his friends that he should 

 spare himself were of any avail, and his 

 early break-down was inevitable. 



"His case is that of all human experi- 

 ence. Pasteur gave the world, at one 

 stroke of perception (verified by him alone, 

 before he gave it forth), the measureless 

 fact — germs; and yet, after only ten years 

 had gathered about this fact an army of 

 followers, the slowly aroused popular in- 

 terest arrived too late to distinguish, so 

 to speak, the one candle in the room from 

 its reflected images in all the window- 

 panes. The Century Dictionary itself 

 actually gives Pasteur as "famous, espe- 

 cially for his researches in bacteria" (Ital- 

 ics mine)— as if there had been any such 

 field at all until he made it ! 



"In Rome, the nearest wine-shop that 

 shuts off your view of St. Peter's is, 

 through perspective, as big as the mighty 

 cathedral itself, and only when you get 

 twenty miles away, out on the campagna, 

 do you fully see the truth — a vast monu- 

 ment towering above a low-lying, spread- 

 out Rome, on the plain beneath. 



"Whatever other bird-lover among us 

 might have done this thing, he did it!" 



