4 T. A. Low ARD — Presidential Address 



those they class as vermin or merely consider ugly. Here 

 again, where there is cruelty in destruction, it is safe and right 

 to use the humanitarian argument for all that it is worth, but 

 we must avoid faddism ; the massacre of the plume-bearing 

 herons for the " ospreys " of commerce entails the slow 

 torture and starvation of young birds as well as the cruel 

 death of the parents, and this gruesome fact has, when pointed 

 out by reasonable advocates, influenced many tender-hearted 

 women to deny themselves the ornaments they coveted. 



The last and least popular argument is the Scientific, or, 

 to put it in other words, the argument for scientific reasons. 

 It is, apart from economic arguments, most difficult to 

 advocate, and yet, I must confess, it is the one which appeals 

 most to my mind. It is an ethical question, and it is fair to 

 say that its force cannot be urged without admitting an 

 element of all other arguments. Why should it mean any- 

 thing- to us if a species becomes extinct, ceases to exist? 

 Nature's competitive struggle has swept away untold forms 

 without any call upon man's influence, swept them away 

 before man appeared upon the earth, brushed them aside, 

 the '' thousand types," actually to allow the development of 

 the better fitted creatures, amongst which Man ranks so high. 

 If Man be merely looked upon as a competitor in a highly 

 competitive world, there is no reason why we should bemoan 

 the fate of such types as were an impediment to his develop- 

 ment. Yet, I am sure, that this Society alone contains many 

 who share mv feeling of regret whenever they see evidence 

 of depletion in numbers of any species ; probably they also 

 share my inabilitv to explain why, when wanton destruction 

 or the influence of purely natural forces is causing this 

 reduction, a wave of sentiment, which has in it something of 

 the feeling of chivalry, impels them to uphold the cause of 

 the oppressed. Franklv it is not the death of the individual 

 which matters, thus the humanitarian impulse fails to apply, 

 it is the threatened destruction of some existing form. 



We cannot argue, at any rate with ease, that we suffer 

 personallv because the great auk foolishly refused to develop 

 wings and would persist in placing its e^g on a shelving rock 

 up which men with clubs could climb as easily as itself ; is it 

 a matter of inconvenience to us that the Greenland right-whale 

 possessed more blubber than sense and so allowed itself to be 

 outwitted by the northern whalers, who in their rapacity 

 destroved their own livelihood ? Does it really matter that 

 Ave never saw a living dodo, or that Wicken Fen was made a 

 preserved area too late to save the large copper? Yet these 



