April 12, 1900] 



NATURE 



567 



of Wyoming or Montana has bagged a wapiti with 

 antlers, or a bighorn with horns an inch or two larger 

 than the best of his own killing, remains a matter of 

 indifference " (p. 43.)- 



But the " scientific investigator " need not have been 

 dragged into the argument ; it is "a matter of indiffer- 

 ence'' to him also that an individual of a species already 

 thoroughly studied should in some minor characteristic 

 exceed its fellows by an inch or two, and it is not in his 

 interests that the indiscriminate collecting of " trophies " 

 can be justified. 



In commenting on the abortive attempts which have been 

 made, both in British Columbia and the United States, to 

 arrest the destruction by the enactment of game-laws, Mr. 

 Baillie-Grohman has some pertinent remarks. He says : — 



" To have to acknowledge that the destruction of big 

 game there " {i.e. in the hunting grounds of the Rockies) 

 " was the work of one single generation is not a pleasant 

 truth ibr the ' Makers of the West.' Until the completion 

 of the first trans-continental railway, thirty years ago, 

 the muzzle-loaders of white men had made no 

 serious impression upon bison and wapiti, upon 

 bighorn and deer. . . . Unjustifiable as the 

 rapid extinction of the red man will appear to 

 our grandchildren, the extermination of the 

 animals that dwelt on his plains, that roamed 

 his forests, or that filled his rivers, must seem 

 even less excusable, for, in their case, protection 

 should have been as possible as is in civilised 

 communities the enforcement of laws protect- 

 ing human life. But the frontiersman, ... in 

 his fierce and utterly selfish attack upon nature, 

 waged a merciless war, the like of which no 

 country has ever seen, for in days of older con- 

 quests the scientific means of wreaking destruc- 

 tion in such a wholesale manner were lacking. 

 The finely-sighted Sharp breech-loader, with 

 which he rolled over in one 'stand ' as many as 

 forty or fifty bison in as many minutes, ... is 

 as much an invention of our time as is the 

 giant powder (dynamite) cartridge, with which 

 he kills by one explosion literally hundreds of 

 salmon and trout in a single deep pool. A 

 vastly increased network of railways assists 

 him in reaching hunting grounds. . . . Even 

 the telegraph wire . . . was pressed into 

 service. . . . The same merciless war against 

 nature was waged by the miner and prospector ; 

 the one, by depositing vast masses of worthless 

 'tailings' and rock di'bris into fertile valleys 

 . . . ; or by setting fire to the forests in spots 

 likely to contain mineral wealth. Thus were 

 denuded by conflagrations, which the writer 

 has known to last in the Kootenay country and along 

 Puget Sound from May to October, thousands and tens 

 of thousands of square miles of country covered with the 

 most superb woods to be seen in any part of the world" 

 (pp. 28-30). ... 



" And what about the game-laws ? . . . The laws, and 

 sufficiently good laws, were there all right enough on 

 paper, and, what is more, they had been framed at a 

 sufficiently early date to have saved the bulk of the game, 

 only there was nobody to enforce them. That was the 

 crux of the whole question " (p. i"^. 



But in reading Mr. Grohman's eloquent denuncia- 

 tions, one cannot help feeling that it is his sense of 

 the slaughter having been done by the wrong persons 

 and in the wrong manner that has aroused his anger, 

 and not the mere fact that the animals have perished. 

 It seems to be implied that such game should have 

 been reserved for "sportsmen," and not have fallen to 

 the despised " hide-hunters " and " meat-hunters." Yet it 

 is these latter, after all, who could give the better practical 

 excuse for the mischief they have done. 



NO. 1589, VOL. 6l] 



The incongruity of the author's attitude is curiously 

 exemplified in the latter part of the chapter (ii.) above- 

 quoted, where he mentions the " pettifogging meanness " 

 of the British Columbian ganie-laws and the "absurd 

 jealousy of English sportsmen," and especially where he 

 undertakes to give "a few practical hints concerning the 

 working of the game-laws of the Western States." After 

 a brief reference to the wide privileges of a settler, who 

 can kill game for his own use practically at any season 

 of the year, we read : — 



" What is the use, one may well ask, of the Montana 

 law limiting a stranger to two wapiti so long as there are 

 no officials to see that this number is not exceeded ? In 

 a country where in the wilder parts you can still travel 

 and hunt for weeks without seeing a human being, it 

 would require an army far larger than that of the whole 

 United States to enforce such regulations. And even 

 were such an army available, the investment of 50/. in a 

 ' ranch ' makes the stranger a ' settler ' in the eyes of the 

 law. 



Fig. 2. — Salmon leaping an i8 ft. high fall on White Bear River, L-»br.-idor. 



" In one respect care has to be exercised : it is concerning 

 the trophies. These should not be brought to the railway 

 stations in numbers exceeding the law's limit., for black- 

 mailers, prompted by the reward in the shape of half the 

 fine., have of late years more than once caused English as 

 well as American shooting parties considerable trouble and 

 expense. The task of transporting the trophies out to the 

 raihvay should be left to your hunter or euide to accom- 

 plish after you have left. If he is 7uorth his salt, he will 

 ma7iage to get eight or ten picked heads to the railway 

 and dispatch them, packed in cases, without any trouble" 

 (p. 42, original not in italics). 



Now how can the author — no doubt a staunch up- 

 holder of our own game-laws— defend this incitement 

 to lawlessness ? All game-laws must be essentially 

 arbitrary conventions, and can only be supported on 

 a conventional basis; and if it be a crime to break 

 such laws in our own country, it is equally a crime to 

 break them across the Atlantic. Is, then, the risk of 

 detection to be the only deterrent in these matters, 

 and is the man to be called a blackmailer on the other 



