476 
NATURE 
[DECEMBER 25, 1913 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 
opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 
can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 
the writers of, rejected manuscripts intended for 
this or any other part of Nature. No notice is 
taken of anonymous communications.] 
The Plumage Bill. 
I HAVE read with much interest Sir Harry John- 
ston’s article in Nature of December 11 (p. 428) on 
the Plumage Bill proposed to be introduced next 
session into Parliament. I agree in the main with 
him that the Bill does not give as much satisfaction 
as was hoped for to “‘root and branch reformers,” 
for it exempts from supervision personal clothing 
worn or imported by individuals entering this country 
from abroad. Consequently a woman resolved to 
have headdresses and robes of forbidden plumage has 
only to purchase such abroad and stick it into her 
apparel or her hat and she passes our Customs houses 
unchallenged. 
This weakness in the Bill can surely be eliminated 
by making the wearing of wild birds’ feathers in 
England by British subjects as illegal as the importa- 
tion of the feathers. If no feathers can be intro- 
duced, it is obvious that anyone wearing them is 
act and part in their introduction, and the contraband 
is therefore subject to seizure. In any case, the 
Customs officers may examine any luggage suspect 
of concealing contraband plumes, and confiscate the 
feathers in the hat or dress of any subject when a law 
to the effect comes into force, just as they can now 
with any other species of contraband. It seems an 
absurdity to disallow the import of feathers, and yet 
allow them to’be flaunted openly in the street. Of 
course, foreign visitors wearing feathers in England 
could not be legitimately interfered with; but it 
would be illegal for them to sell or dispose of the same 
in this country. Yet it would matter little if the 
wearing of plumes by British subjects were illegal. I 
think the American law, by which feathers worn by 
foreign visitors to the States, in whose country the 
custom is legitimate, are seized, is indefensible. It 
is all right when applied to its own subjects; but to 
foreigners it is nothing short of legalised assault and 
insult. How would a Maori chief, with the huia 
feathers distinctive of his rank in his hair, be dealt 
with ? 
Such a case as the Nipal trade could, as Sir Harry 
Johnston indicates, be easily blocked either at the 
frontier or at the Calcutta Customs House, and regu- 
lated in the same manner as the trade in opium or 
arms is. 
As a British ornithologist, I hope Sir Harry will 
allow me to take exception, if I do not misunderstand 
him, to his charge of lukewarmness against our 
union in respect to this Bill. The union may contain 
a few opponents of the measure—they are chiefly egg- 
harriers—but the attitude of the great majority of its 
members most certainly is not that ‘‘so long as 
museum shelves are stuffed with specimens birds may 
be in the landscape or not.’’ Only a few of the 
members have private collections or are museum 
conservators. At the last largely attended meeting of 
the club, a few days ago, approbation was universally 
extended to one of our members for having, by the 
expenditure of much time and with infinite patience, 
tried to identify by aid of his binocular a rare visitor to 
a certain part of England, instead of ‘‘collecting’’ it, 
which he could easily have done, and so spared him- 
self, at the expense of a charming addition to the 
fortunate locality. 
Is Sir Harry not rather inconsequent in asking 
NO. 2304, VOL. 92] 
' by M? is no longer constant, the values for copper, 
‘ why should there be any more killing of birds and. 
beasts, and relegating their life-study to the camera, 
while reminding his fellow-ornithologists ‘‘that it is 
not only the skin of the bird f6r classification that is 
needed, but still more the bones, the muscles, and 
the viscera and the living creature itself’? I fear 
he cannot get these omelettes without breaking the 
eggs! A long series of skins is, moreover, now con- 
sidered necessary for the real study of species. I 
may associate Sir Harry with myself as men who 
have collected largely, in affirming that the real 
scientific collector and lover of birds, who is also an 
exterminator of species, is a very rare person. Any- 
how, over-destruction of animals for scientific pur- 
poses can be easily regulated by licence. Neither 
plume-hunters nor wardens can replace the scientific 
collector in obtaining materials for investigation. 
The real object desired by the Royal Society for 
the Protection of Birds is the prevention of the great 
cruelty for which the plumage trade is responsible, 
of the extermination, and of the reduction towards 
that point of the beautiful and beneficent fauna of the 
world. America by her draconic law has thé credit of 
beginning the war against extermination on effective 
principles. The evil must be scotched, both at the source 
and at the terminus of the trade. If England and her 
possessions prohibit the export, import, and wearing 
of plumes, assisted by Germany and Austria (and I 
understand they desire to cooperate with this country 
in the matter), the fashion for wearing feathers would 
die out notwithstanding the open market of Paris 
and Antwerp, and with it this nefarious trade. Where 
a species becomes so numerous as to cause loss to 
the agriculturist, it would be easy enough to give 
special licence for its destruction without leave to 
export the skins, for then there would be no induce- 
ment to kill more than might be necessary to “ abate 
the nuisance.” Against “discriminating reasonably ” 
and allowing others so procured to be exported there 
could be no objection, if it were possible; but the Cus- 
toms officers would then require to be trained ornitho- 
logists. The difficulty of determining a scheduled 
species is extremely difficult, and has been the cause 
principally of the failure of our Counties Bird Protec- 
tion Bill. 
All ‘‘root-and-branch reformers” in this matter are 
more than grateful to Sir Harry Johnston for his 
constant advocacy of a Bill that shall be effective to 
preserve the beautiful and useful animals of the world 
in face of the opposition of a ‘‘ barbarous industry.” 
Henry O. Forses. 
Redcliffe, Beaconsfield, December 14. 
ti tt 
Intra-atomic Charge and the Structure of the Atom. 
I am very grateful to Mr. Soddy (Nature, Decem- 
ber 4, p. 399) that in accepting in principle the 
hypothesis that the intra-atomic charge of an element 
is determined by its place in the periodic table, he 
directed attention to the possible uncertainty of the 
absolute values of intra-atomic charge and of the 
number of intra-atomic electrons. Surely the absolute 
values depend on the number of rare-earth elements ; 
but if to the twelve elements of this series, the inter- 
national table contains between cerium and tantalum, 
the new elements (at least four) discovered by Auer 
von Welsbach in thulium (Monatshefte fiir Chemie — 
32, Mai, S. 373), further keltium, discovered by 
Urbain (Comptes rendus d. l’Acad. des Sciences, 152, — 
141-3), and an unknown one for the open place be- 
tween praseodymium and samarium be added, this 
long period, too, becomes regular. Moreover, if only 
twelve instead of eighteen elements existed here, the 
ratio of the large-angle scattering per atom divided 
