FIFTY-FIRST CONGRESS, 1889-1891. 1441 
_ repeated unless it is a simple way of increasing the appropriation. I 
want to put myself on record as opposing this scheme of sending men 
abroad to hunt for and purchase wild animals to increase the size of 
this zoological park, and consequently to enlarge the expense of main- 
taining it. 
There is no necessity for the United States Government going ito 
the business of purchasing wild animals. There is no necessity of 
their increasing their corps of employees to hunt up wild beasts, and 
for the transportation of wild animals and for the ‘‘payment of 
necessary employees.” The same expression is in two consecutive 
paragraphs of the bill. 
A Memper. In three. 
Mr. SrockxpaLe. Now, I just simply wanted to say that this is a 
scheme the expense of which never will cease, but which will be con- 
stantly increasing. You not only increase the expense of maintaining 
the Zoological Park—hbetter termed the Menagerie—but you devolve 
an expense upon the Government to pay men for going through the 
country and hunting up wild animals and purchasing and transporting 
them to this city; and you will find whenever you include this proposi- 
tion in your appropriation bills and begin to buy animals that there 
will be no wild animals that can be obtained otherwise than by pur- 
chase when the owners know that such a provision has been made. 
Besides that, Mr. Chairman, who will determine the price of a buf- 
falo or a monkey or a rhinoceros? Why, the man who has it to sell; 
and these fellows that the Government sends out—how are they going 
to know the price of a rhinoceros or an elephant or a monkey? Why, 
what does my friend, the gentleman from Alabama [Mr. Wheeler], 
know about the price of a rhinoceros? 
Mr. M. A. Smirx of Arizona. Or sea lions? . 
Mr. Srockpae. Yes, or of sea lions; or, as my friend from New 
Jersey said the other day, of coyotes? Whowill know anything about 
their price except the man who has the sea lion or the coyote or the 
rhinoceros to sell? Why, he might impress upon these Government 
experts who make the purchases the idea that because of the horn on 
the end of the nose of the rhinoceros the animal was more valuable, 
and some dude will be sent out from here as a Government employee 
to inspect the animal who probably would not know that they should 
not pay an additional price for that horn. 
I say it is simply increasing a stupendous folly from year to year, 
and it ought to be nipped in the bud right now, for the reason that 
after a while we will not have as much money as when we entered upon 
it, and if we had not had a surplus then it never would have been 
inaugurated. 
The time is not far distant in this country when there will be a 
reckoning, and when Congress begins to tax the people to supply a 
H. Doe. 732 91 
