226 AMERICAN GAME. 



tember, October, and November. All legislation, how- 

 ever, on the subject of game preservation would seem to 

 be hopeless, so long as the whole tone and spirit of the 

 popular mind of the masses is regulary set against their 

 enforcement. Nothing, indeed, is more singular or more 

 to be lamented than the strange perversion of intellect 

 which seems to have come over the whole body of the 

 white settlers of North America, whether of Canada, 

 New Brunswick, the Atlantic States, or the far West, 

 leading them to wage incessant and merciless war on 

 every wild animal, whether of fur, fin, or feather, 

 slaughtering them at all times, and in all places, in 

 season and out of season ; when their flesh is nutritive 

 and delicious, when it is utterly unfit for the food of 

 man ; when their peltries or feathers are commercially 

 valuable, when they are worthless; slaughtering them 

 wantonly and recklessly for the mere love of slaughter, 

 and often leaving their carcases to decay in the depths 

 of the forest, until they are becoming all but extinct, as 

 in a few years they unquestionably will, unless sounder 

 views shall hereafter prevail. The willful waste and 

 wanton annihilation of the buffalo in the "West ; the 

 knocking on the head of the deer, in New York and 

 Pennsylvania, with clubs, by snow-shoe mounted ruffians, 

 during the deep snows of winter, when their flesh and 

 hides are alike valueless and that literally by tens of 

 thousands ; and the sweeping the spawning beds of the 

 salmon with the seine, and persecuting the spent and 



