124 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 
The modern increased facilities of transportation have 
brought distant markets within reach of the professional hunt- 
er, and thereby given a new impulse to his destructive propen- 
sities. Not only do all Great Britain and Ireland contribute to 
the supply of game for the British capital, but the canvas-back 
duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen from the basin 
of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls of the London 
poulterer. Kohl* informs us that on the coasts of the North 
Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually taken in the 
course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to the large 
maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great European 
cities show a prodigious consumption of game-birds, but the 
official returns fall far below the truth, because they do not 
include the rural districts, and because neither the poacher nor 
his customers report the number of his victims. Reproduction, 
in cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with this excessive 
destruction, and there is no doubt that all the wild birds which 
are chased for their flesh or their plumage are diminishing 
with a rapidity which justifies the fear that the last of them 
will soon follow the dodo and the wingless auk. 
Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their flesh 
or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used as 
food, are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them 
by nature, not otherwise specially useful to man, and, there- 
fore, their wholesale destruction is an economical evil only in 
the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an 
evil.t If it were possible to confine the consumption of game- 
fowl] to a number equal to the annual increase, the world would 
be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be by 
* Die Herzogthiimer Schleswig und Holstein, i., p. 203. 
+ The increased demand for animal oils for the use of the leather-dresser 
is now threatening the penguin with the fate of the wingless auk. According 
to the Report of the Agricultural Department of the U. 8. for August and 
September, 1871, p. 340, small vessels are fitted out for the chase of this bird, 
and return from a six weeks’ cruise with 25,000 or 30,000 gallons of oil. 
About eleven birds are required for a gallon, and consequently the vessels 
take upon an average 300,000 penguins each, 
