INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS. 23 



their experience, or to plead the cause of her persecuted and 

 ahnost exterminated game. 



" Within the last few years, indeed, much has been done. A 

 whole host of sporting writers have sprung up in all quarters of 

 the land, having their rendezvous and rallying point in the 

 columns of the New York Spirit of the Times. 



" Still, most of these writers have aspired rather to enter- 

 tain than to instruct ; rather to depict scenes and incidents to 

 the life, than to draw from those scenes a moral and a theory." 



Even the beautiful edition of that admirable English work. 

 " Hawker on Shooting" — prepared for the American reader b} 

 my excellent friend, William T. Porter, known throughout the 

 length and breadth of the -continent as a thorough and accom- 

 plished sportsman — does not descend to those minute details of 

 the zoological distinctions, nomenclature, and habits of our vari- 

 ous species of game, which I propose to give to my readers ; noi 

 — though abounding with graphic accounts and highly colored 

 anecdotes relating to every species of shooting or hunting, does 

 it present any views or suggest any means for the preservation 

 of game, or for the acquisition of skill in woodcraft and gunnery 

 in this country — both being very different on this from what 

 they are on the other side of the Atlantic. 



This consideration — connected with another, namely, that for 

 the last two years hardly a week has passed without my re- 

 ceiving a letter from some person addicted to field sports, in all. 

 even the remotest, parts of the country, requesting me to suggest 

 some plan for the prevention of, what all see to be imminent, the 

 total annihilation of game within our borders — has led me h 

 believe that the time has airived, when a work of this charactei 

 is called for by the country in general, and is likely to be as well 

 received as the deficiencies of its author will permit. 



And now, after these brief introductory observations, I shah 

 state what is my plan for the arrangement of this work, and 

 thereafter plunge at once in Medias Res. 



In the first place, I propose briefly to ascertain what are the 

 game of the United States and Provinces of America — a point 



