APPENDIX. 345 



with that moderation which should always characterise a civilised 

 people, to afford both the Invigorating pleasures of sport and luxuries 

 for the market. Every stream and lake abounds with trout, and 

 there are but few rivers from Cape Sable to the Labrador which the 

 salmon does not annually attempt to ascend. 



What, then, is to be desired ? Has not America, receiving from 

 the east all those useful animals which accompany man in his migra- 

 tions, and which, returning to a state of nature in the plains of 

 Mexico and South America, have multiplied so greatly as to afford a 

 staple product for exportation, giving all imaginable luxuries to the 

 new-coming nations in the produce of her forests, prairies, rivers, and 

 sea coasts ? Yes, but the gift has been abused. It is sad to con- 

 template the wanton destruction of game and game fish throughout 

 the northern continent since its first settlement by Europeans : many 

 animals, now on the verge of extinction, driven off their still large 

 domains, not primarily by the approach of civilisation, but by ruth- 

 less, wholesale, and wanton modes of destruction. " One invariable 

 peculiarity of the American people," says the author of " The Game 

 Eish of the North," " is that they attack, overturn, and annihilate, 

 and then laboriously reconstruct. Our first farmers chopped down 

 the forests and shade trees, took crop after crop of the same kind 

 from the land, exhausted the soil, and made bare the country ; they 

 hunted and fished, destroying first the wild animals, then the birds, 

 and finally the fish, till in many places these ceased utterly from the 

 face of the earth ; and then, when they had finished their work, that 

 race of gentlemen moved west to renew the same course of destruc- 

 tion. After them came the restorers ; they manured the land, left it 

 fallow, put in practice the rotation of crops, planted shade and fruit 

 trees, discovered that birds were useful in destroying insects and 

 worms, passed laws to protect them where they were not utterly 

 extinct, as with the pinnated grouse of Pennsylvania and Long 

 Island, and will, I predict, ere long re-stock the streams, rivers, and 

 ponds, with the best of the fish that once inhabited them." 



A home question for our subject would be, — In the hands of which 

 class of men does this colony now find itself ? And I fear the un- 

 hesitating answer of the impartial stranger and visitor would be, 

 that in all regarding the preservation of our living natural resources, 

 we were in the hands of the destroyers. The course of destruc- 

 tion so ably depicted by the author quoted, is being prosecuted 

 throughout the length and breadth of Nova Scotia, and the settlers 

 of this province, blind to their own interests, careless of their children's, 



