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 
