44 SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS. 
able ornament deserves nothing but castigation, and that in 
unmeasured terms. No apology can be made for such 
wanton cruelty. It is matter for great rejoicing that the 
wearing of birds on ladies’ bonnets has almost gone out of 
vogue, and is scarcely considered good form to-day; at 
least, such is my impression, although I do not profess to 
be posted on fashionable modes and fads. My opinion is, 
however, that a brilliant-hued bird on a woman’s bonnet 
would now be considered Jéotsterous—which some of you 
may recognize as a synonym for “loud.” That surely is 
an indication that the Millennium is coming, and we might 
already begin to sing, ‘“ All hail, the glorious morn!” with- 
out being guilty of an anachronism. A bird in the bush is 
worth forty on the head. It is apt to kill more troublesome 
insects. Between the man who shoots a beautiful bird 
and sells it to the fashion-monger, and the woman who wears 
it, the moral distance is infinitesimal. 
There is another class of slayers of the innocents who 
deserve a word of rebuke. I may here be treading on 
delicate ground, and the technologist in bird-lore may take 
exceptions to some things I shall say. However, to get to 
the point at once, I refer to the professional collector—the 
man who massacres birds and burglarizes their nests for 
glimmering lucre; the clutcher who is forever clutching 
after “clutches.” I may be accused of lacking the true 
scientific spirit, and of being a mere sentimentalist ; but I 
retaliate, if you please, that a little more sentimentality, in 
the sense of tenderness of heart, would not hurt a good 
many of the naturalists of this and other countries. If 
science consists merely or chiefly in addition and multiplica- 
tion tables, and never-ending catalogues of Latin names, 
then let us slay all the sweet creatures around us, and live 
on statistics instead of fruits and’cereals. But I suspect that 
there is as much science in discovering a live bird’s real 
character, learning his cunning ways, his likes and dislikes, 
as in classifying a dead bird’s bones. 
