
A Plea For Honesty 
In a recent editorial we protested against 
the habit of dishonest dealers in palming off 
upon the public any sort of a substitute in place 
of the food the innocent purchaser thinks he 
is buying, and this protest was made on the 
ground of simple honesty. 
It is high time that we return to the old- 
fashioned ideas of integrity, and the sooner we 
do so the better it will be for everybody. But 
" WHOLESALE LYING 
is not by any means confined to the manufac- 
turers of adulterated food, or even to fishermen. 
So accustomed are we to consider the anglers’ 
tales as fiction that we commonly call an 
exaggerated account of anything a “‘fish story.” 
But it is not well to be too hard upon the 
fishermen, God bless.them. They are a genial, 
whole-souled lot of fellows and they really 
believe that the fish that got away was the 
biggest one ever seen, besides which their 
lies are harmless and prompted by enthusiasm 
for the sports and a desire to entertain their 
friends. 
The fishermen’s lies, on the whole, are com- 
mendable, but..when a man lies regarding 
scientific facts he is committing a serious crime 
against education, progress.and all of those 
things which should be considered sacred. 
When a man goes up North with a bunch of 
guides, and sits in his tent all day “smoking 
his pipe of clay” while the guides do the hunt- 
ing, then when this same man brings out a lot 
of game, which his guides have killed for him, 
and, not content with that, writes a book upon 
the trip telling how he killed the game (he 
never killed) and describes part of the country 
(he never visited), he is committing a more 
serious crime than the poor fool of a financier 
who substitutes oleomargarine for butter. 
We have seen a dozen men come out of the 
woods, each of them with the full quota of 
game allowed by the law, and, to our personal 
knowledge, not one of them was within five 
miles of the game when it was shot. Not satis- 
fied with this, one man paid a guide $30 for 
the privilege of shooting a bear, which was at 
the time fast in a trap, and $5 apiece for two 
deer which the guide killed for him. The last 
deer was killed while we were eating breakfast 
with this great (?) hunter, and yet he is to-day 
proudly pointing to the bearskin rug and the 
upholstered heads of those poor animals as 
trophies of his own skill in woodcraft and 
hunting, when the truth is if you would take 
him a hundred yards in the woods and turn 
him around two or three times, he would be as 
much lost as if he were dropped from a balloon 
in the centre of a primeval forest. But this is 
not the most serious charge we have against 
these 
FAKE SPORTSMEN. 
As head-hunters they have caused a rivalry 
among others of their class to produce 
record-breaking heads of big game. The 
demand for such things has made the supply 
and the taxidermist’s skill has produced compos- 
ite heads which are truly record-breakers. 
There is a bighorn head of this description 
which has created a great deal of comment 
and been greatly admired by scientific men, 
yet this much-talked-of head originally be- 
longed to more than one sheep. 
It would probably be true if we stated that 
every one of the record-breaking heads is a 
fake. 
It is a common practice among the woods- 
men to increase the spread. cf the horns by 
braces while the heads are stili fresh. In some 
cases this is done by sawing the skull in half 
and then fitting it together again in such a way 
as to increase the spread of the horns. Without 
going into detail, there are numerous methods 
by which an expert taxidermist can produce a 
record-breaker. They do not hesitate to take 
parts of different heads and make a composite 
one to meet the desire on the part of the head- 
hunter for a record-breaker. This may be 
news to the general public, and news to a few 
of the scientists who have honestly accepted 
such heads as genuine, but it is no news to-the 
old hunters from the mouth of the Mackenzie 
River down to the Maine woods and from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, and its publica- 
tion will only cause a wink and a smile among 
the taxidermists who concoct these monstrosi- 
ties. 

