18 BIRDS. 
compelled to take bird-life. It is not an easy matter 
to “name all the birds without a gun,” though an 
opera-glass will often render identification entirely 
certain, and leave the songster unharmed; but once 
having mastered the birds, the true ornithologist leaves 
his gun at home. This view of the case may not be 
agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the “ closet 
naturalist,” but for my own part the closet naturalist 
is a person with whom I have very little sympathy, 
He is about the most wearisome and profitless creature 
in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases of 
eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish 
nomenclature, he is not only the enemy of the birds 
but the enemy of all those who would know them 
rightly. 
Not the collectors alone are to blame for the dimin- 
ishing numbers of our wild birds, but a large share 
of the responsibility rests upon quite a different class 
of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in 
dress is as destructive to our feathered friends as are 
false aims in science. It is said that the tzaffic in 
the skins of our brighter plumaged birds, arising 
from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds 
of thousands annually. I am told of one middleman 
who collected from the shooters in one district, in four 
months, seventy thousand skins. It is a barbarous 
taste that craves this kind of ornamentation. Think 
of a woman or girl of real refinement appearing upon 
the street with her head gear adorned with the scalps 
of our songsters ! 
It is probably true that the number of our birds 
destroyed by man is but a small percentage of the 
number cut off by their natural enemies; but it is te 
be remembered that those he destroys are in addition 
