16 BULLETIN 2 



The Botanical Club is creating and training constantly 

 skilled botanists. It has them in all stages of development 

 from embryo to maturity. It includes among its member- 

 ship botanists who are known, honored and revered beyond 

 the limits of V^ermont, New England and the United 

 States, in fact every where that flowers are studied and 

 loved. Why has Vermont never produced a trained, ex- 

 pert, famous ornithologist? 



The Botanical Club has the advantage of the Bird Club in 

 one intensely interesting and all absorbing line of investi- 

 gations. I refer to the dividing and subdividing of speices. 

 Think of the crategus, the sedges, the violets, and the 

 blackberries. How fascinating it is to discover, to estab- 

 lish and to name new species and varieties. Is the tenden- 

 cy to vary greater among plants than among birds or are 

 the senses of the botanists keener and their power of ob- 

 servation more acute Is it possible for us, members of 

 the Bird Club to subdivide the Vermont crow into thirty 

 or forty varieties? 



There appeared in the village of Essex Junction two sum- 

 mers ago a robin which imitated the whippoorwill's song so 

 perfectly as to deceive the trained ear. Now let us name 

 this particular robin merula migratoria, variety whippoor- 

 willia. I have the type species. All you need to do is to 

 discover the recurrence of whippoorwillia in other parts of 

 the state and then our variety will be established. 



There is another robin at the present time in Essex Junc- 

 tion reared in the house from a fledgeling, never having 

 heard the song of its own kind. When it began to sing it 

 did not sing the robin's song but those seemingly of its own 

 invention. The good lady who raised the bird maintains 

 that it takes some of its tunes from a neighbor's phono- 

 graph. Let us naine this bird merula migratoria phono- 

 graphia. 



The last but by no means the least among the objects of 

 our Club is "to secure protection to all useful species of 

 birds." It is a well known fact that the bird laws of Ver- 

 mont are not strictly enforced. Moreover, in certain sec- 

 tions they are openly and grossly disobeyed. In many 

 towns where a foreign element predominates birds are in- 

 discriminately slaughtered, being used in many cases by 

 such people for food. 



There is more than one town in Vermont where the birds 

 are practically shot out of existence. In the summer of 

 1905 a member of the Bird Club passed through a town in 

 southern Vermont, where most of the birds had been shot. 



