PART II. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 



ARTIFICIAL OSPREYS. 



ALTHOUGH the " artificial osprey " is at present held in abeyance, 

 it has for so many years occupied a prominent place in the tactics 

 of the plume-market that a brief history of this million- tongued 

 lie can hardly be omitted from any re-statement of the plumage 

 question. Thousands of women have been deceived into buying 

 Egret feathers by the false assertion that they were not Egret 

 feathers, and even now the fable lingers in provincial shops. 

 From the first day when milliners were instructed to sell their 

 osprey s as " artificial " if they could not sell them as " real," to 

 the day when a trade witness before the House of Lords Com- 

 mittee clung to the expiring fraud, but could not produce one 

 specimen of the article for examination, no " artificial osprey " 

 was ever placed in an ornithologist's hand. It may pretty 

 safely be said that no " artificial osprey " was ever made. 



Ladies were told that these things were manufactured from 

 quills, ivorine, silk, wood, the feathers of poultry, etc. ; that they 

 could not be sold so cheaply if they were " real " feathers ; that 

 they could not be sold so cheaply if they were manufac- 

 tured. It was all one he. As Dr. Bowdler Sharpe wrote on one 

 occasion to the Society for the Protection of Birds, when an 

 " osprey," bought as " artificial," had been forwarded to him 

 " I need hardly tell you that it is the same old osprey the 

 nuptial plume of the Heron or Egret." 



Sir William Flower, the Director of the Natural History 

 .Museum, wrote to the " Times " in 1896* to protest against this 

 "monstrous fiction," saying that: 



" One of the most beautiful of birds is being swept off the 

 face of the earth, under circumstances of peculiar cruelty, bol- 

 stered up by a glaring falsehood." 



" Artificial flumes " R.S.P.B. Leaflet, No. 27. 



