GAME PRESERVES 153 



tending to make people, in their contempt for such folly, 

 include in that contempt the whole movement for the pro- 

 tection of wild life. It is a misfortune for any cause to have 

 action taken which, in the public mind, identifies it with the 

 vagaries of mere folly. It seems incredible that grown 

 people, with sufficient intelligence to edit any paper, should 

 fail to understand that ours was merely one of the many 

 scientific exploring expeditions which are opening to civ- 

 ilized mankind a wealth of knowledge concerning the dark 

 continent. Practically every specimen we secured and ab- 

 solutely every specimen excepting a very few animals 

 used purely for food was preserved. With the exception 

 of about a dozen trophies kept for the private collections 

 of the members of the expedition, and with the exception 

 of an elephant given to the University of California, and of 

 a white rhinoceros group given the American Museum of 

 Natural History in New York, all of the many thousands of 

 specimens went to the National Museum at Washington. 

 Probably (although of this we cannot be certain) the editors 

 of the paper in question, who started the petition, would not 

 have started petitions to abolish all our museums; yet even 

 a moderately intelligent child of six ought to be able to see 

 that museums cannot exist unless collections are made for 

 them, and that if it is wrong to collect the specimens that 

 are put in a museum, it can't possibly be right to permit 

 the museum to exist at all. We have no sympathy with 

 mere unintelligent private "collecting," or with any "col- 

 lections" of forms of wild life as if they were postage- 

 stamps; and there are some animals becoming so rare that, 

 even for the great museums, collecting should be done with 

 such caution and care as not to harm the species. In 



