Senator Cobb's bill was referred to the Finance Com- 

 mittee of the Senate. At the hearing which was granted 

 by that committee, Mr. Hornaday appeared in behalf of 

 the measure, and there the whole matter was received in 

 the most friendly spirit. Through the initiative of Sen- 

 ator Armstrong, chairman, the bill was recast in the 

 briefest form possible, and it was inserted as an item in the 

 annual supply bill. On that basis it was approved by both 

 Houses, and the conference committees, and finally passed 

 as part of the supply bill. In efifect, the members of both 

 branches of the Legislature were unanimously in favor 

 of the immediate establishment of a State Bison herd, as 

 proposed by The American Bison Society. 



The membership of the Senate Committe on Finance 

 in 1 907 was as follows: — 



William W. Armstrong Jotham P. Allds 



Henry Wayland Hill William J. Tully 



Owen Cassidy Martin Saxe 



John N. Cordts William T. O'Neil 



John Raines Samuel J. Ramsperger 



DoMiNiCK F. Mullaney Charles H. Fuller 



Thomas F. Grady 



All friends of the American Bison, in general, and the 

 members of the Bison Society in particular, are indebted 

 to Speaker James W. Wadsworth, Jr., Senators Arm- 

 strong, Cobb, Hill and Raines, and Assemblyman Hooper, 

 Moreland and Merritt. The generous spirit in which the 

 matter was received by the New York Legislature as a 

 whole, may fairly be regarded as an index of the interest 

 which nearly all intelligent Americans feel in the per- 

 petual preservation of America's most conspicuous wild 

 quadruped. 



Coincident with the final passage of the supply bill, 

 the Bison Society received what it regarded as a trust- 

 worthy intimation that Governor Hughes was friendly to 

 the proposal for a State Bison herd, and might be expected 

 to approve the item. Nevertheless, both Assemblyman 

 Hooper and the President of the Society wrote the Gov- 

 ernor, separately, requesting a hearing. In making the 

 application Mr. Hornaday took occasion to state pointedly 



