[With the Hon. Secretary's Compliments.] 



" Feathers and Facts " is the latest and most 

 comprehensive statement issued by the Royal 

 Society for the Protection of Birds on the subject 

 of the trade in the plumage of wild birds. It 

 supplies, in the first place, a brief history of the 

 growth of the trade and of the corresponding 

 growth of expostulation and condemnation, on the 

 part of ornithologists and other naturalists, from 

 the time when Professor Newton first expressed 

 in the " Times " his horror on perusing a catalogiie 

 of a London feather sale, and the Journal of the 

 American Ornitholigists' Union described the 

 slaughter going on in Florida, down to the days of 

 the Indian ordinance against the exportation of bird 

 skins and the adoption by the House of Lords of 

 a Bill to prohibit the importation of wild birds' 

 plumage into Great Britain. The main purpose of 

 the pamphlet is, however, to disprove various 

 statements made by the trade in their own defence. 

 One of the earliest and most successful allegations 

 regarding the " osprey," consisted in the well-known 

 story that the plumes were " artificial," and not 

 composed of feathers at all. This forms a curious 

 chapter in trade history. " Thousands of women 

 have been deceived into buying egret feathers by 

 the false assertion that they were not egret feathers, 

 and even now the fabl ( e lingers in provincial shops. 

 From the first day when milliners were instructed 

 to sell their ospreys as ' artificial,' if they could not 

 sell them as ' real,' to the day when a trade witness 

 before the House of Lords Committee 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." Such 

 a manufacture, it is pointed out, would by no means 

 serve the purposes of the traders in plumage, whose 

 aim is naturally to sell their own wares. The place 

 of the so-called artificial osprey has been taken by 

 the plume that is said to be made of moulted 

 feathers " picked up " by the hunters. The 

 Society's pamphlet points out that this theory, as 

 set forth by the trade, rests on the statements of 

 two French travellers, neither of them an ornitho- 

 logist, neither of them wholly unconnected with the 

 trade, and that their assertions are discredited 

 by the evidence of the British Minister in Venezuela, 

 the President and Hon. Secretary of the Argentina 

 Society for the Protection of Animals, Professor 

 Goeldi, author of " The Birds of Brazil," and 

 director of the Para Museum of Natural History, 

 Mr. J. Quelch, B.Sc., formerly curator of the British 

 Guiana Museum, and by recent travellers who have 

 an intimate knowledge of the country in which the 

 birds nest and of the manner in which the feathers 

 are obtained. It is also pointed out that while 

 the trade allege that " the shooting of an egret is 

 now an indictable offence in Venezuela," and declare 



