Forest and Stream. 



A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 



Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copt, ) 

 Six. Months, $2. f 



NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 22, 1888. 



J VOL. XXXI.— No. 18. 



( No. 318 Broadway, New York. 



AD VERTISEMENT8. 

 Only advertisements of an approved character inserted. Inside 

 pages, nonpareil type, 30 cents per line. Special rates for three, six, 

 and twelve months. Seven words to the line, twelve lines to one 

 inch. Advertisements should be sent in by Saturday previous to 

 issue in which they are to be inserted. Transient advertisements 

 must invariably be accompanied by the money or they will not be 

 Inserted. Reading notices $1.00 per line. 



SUBSCRIPTIONS 

 May begin at any time. Subscription price, $4 per year; $2 for six 

 months; to a club of three annual subscribers, three copies for $10; 

 five copies for $16. Remit by express money-order, regi ered letter, 

 money-order, or draft, payable to the Forest and Stream Publishing 

 Company. The paper may be obtained of newsdealers throughout 

 the United States, Canadas and Great Britain. For sale by Davies 

 & Co., No. 1 Finch Lane, Cornhill, London. General subscription 

 agents far Great Britain, Messrs. Davies & Co., and Messrs. Samp- 

 son Low, Marston, Searles and Rivington, 188 Fleet street, London, 

 Eng. Brentano's, 17 Avenue de l'Opera, Paris, France, sole Paris 

 agent for sales and subscriptions. Foreign subscription price, $5 

 per year; $2.50 for six months. 

 Address all communications 



Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 

 No. 318 Broadway. New York Guy. 



CONTENTS. 



Editorial. 



The Ethics of Hunting. 



A Civil Bulwark. 



Public Trout in Private 

 Streams. 

 The Sportsman Tourist. 



Notes on Western Florida-m 

 Natural History. 



Jumping Mice and the Porcu- 

 pines. 



Notes from Missouri. 

 Game Bag and Gun. 



Resorts in the Northwest. 



West Virginia. 



Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 



Hunting Hatchet. 



Western Mass. Pox Club. 



The Woodcock Supply. 



Missouri Gnme Iuterests. 



Chicago and the West. 



To Connecticut Sportsmen. 

 Sea and Rwih Fishing. 



His Highness Salvelinus Na- 

 maycush.— rt. 



The Biggest Bass in Lake. Giles 



Bois iJ'Arc Rods. 



Chicago and the West. 



Silkworm Gut and Leaders. 



Spawning Habits of Black 

 Bass. 

 Fishculture. 



The Connecticut Commission. 



Salmon Hatching on the 

 Clackamas River. 



The Kennel. 

 The Eastern Field Trials. 

 Philadelphia Club Trials. 

 Robins Island Club. 

 The Coursing Meets. 

 More Coon. 



A Day with the Blue Ridge 



Beagles. 

 Scent and Other Faculties. 

 Watchdogs. 

 Bench vs. Field. 

 St. Bernard Club of America. 

 Practical Judging. 

 Gun-Shyness. 

 "Our Prize Dogs. 1 ' 

 A Short Essay on Puppyism. 

 American Kennel Register. 

 Clarence F. Speir. 

 Dog Talk. 



Southern Field Trials. 



Kennel Notes. 

 Rifle and Trap Shooting. 



Range and Gallery. 



New England vs. Old England. 



The Trap. 

 Yachting. 



Duck Shooting Under Difficul- 

 ties.— II. 



Woua. 

 Canoeing. 



A. C A- Meet of 1889. 



A. C. A. Executive Committee. 

 New Publications. 

 Answers to Correspondents. 



A CIVIL BULWARK. 



THERE is in this city of New York the regiment which 

 of all others in the country may most properly 

 lay claim to being the crack organization of citizen 

 soldiery. It is the Seventh Regiment, N. G. S. N. Y., and 

 it has its full quota of men and officers; every place in 

 the ranks is filled, and a long list is in the recruit squads 

 waiting for a vacancy in the regular ranks. It has social 

 standing, while military men who have given their lives 

 to the study and practice of arms give it unstinted praise. 



But we did not mention the Seventh to speak of it as a 

 kid-gloved, prettily uniformed body. It is all that and a 

 great deal more. It has 1,000 men in its ranks, and it 

 has 921 marksmen in that number. What does that 

 mean? A great deal indeed to those who have studied 

 the uprising of modern rifle practice in this country. 

 Since the Forest and Stream was started all this 

 modern use of the soldier's arm has come into being. 

 There are men now in the regiment who have been on its 

 muster roll for twenty-five years. They will tell how for 

 the first ten years of their military experience such a feat 

 as shooting off the rifle they so daintily carried and so 

 carefully polished was never expected of them. They 

 got 100 per cent, in military duty, and were not able to 

 fire off their arms, much less use them intelligently. 

 Then came the agitation in favor of rifle practice. 

 Wingate led it, and it won favor wonderfully, and now 

 the figures 921 out of 1,000 as marksmen tell of the present 

 status of the movement in its best development. 



What is a marksman? By the regulations it is one 

 who, using the State arms— and this is the .50cal. "gas 

 pipe'' Remington — has been able to make 25 in a possible 

 50 at 200 and 500yds. Reducing these figures to a more 

 intelligible form, it means to a New Yorker, who will 

 hold his hat up at any point on the avenue, that a Seventh 

 Regiment marksmen will stand three blocks away and 

 put a bullet through that hat crown, at least in each 

 alternate shot. He may do better, but his work must be 

 of this standard if he is to win the marksman's badge of 

 200yds. off-hand work. At 500yds. , or say about seven 

 blocks off, the marksman will stretch himself prone upon 

 Hie ground and hit a barrel head at each alternate shot, 

 or do work the equivalent of this in an aiming way. 



It is no small enterprise for this number of young men 

 to get away from business enough to acquire this skill. 

 It is a positive proof of the excellence of the arms they 

 have and the ammunition they use; and it is a complete 

 and overwhelming proof that the work of the FobesT 

 and Stream and other journals which have urged and 

 pointed the way to this reform in military standard of 

 excellence has been well carried out. 



Another view of this accomplishment in shooting is 

 that it properly completes the guard as a bulwark of 

 civil liberty. The militia has a double object in being. 

 It is first of all and all the time ready to be called upon 

 to quell a riot, which passes beyond the control of the 

 civic constables. Then it is, in this republic at least, an 

 organization which on the occurrence of a war may be 

 swelled into an army at the shortest notice. Imagine a 

 mob facing a set of men in uniform, and knowing, too, 

 that those men had guns which they were incapable of 

 handling. Imagine again that same mob facing such a 

 guard as that illustrated in the Seventh, where over 90 per 

 cent, of the men are marksmen, and let that mob know 

 what a marksman is and what he can do, 



We hope the day may never come when the Seventh or 

 its fellows in the militia may be called upon to quell a riot 

 by the use of ball cartridges; the very fact that there are 

 so many marksmen will tend to put off that day; but 

 should it ever come, one volley will do the work which 

 it would have required a week's fighting under the old 

 regime, when the only difference between a guardsman 

 and a mobsman was that one had a uniform and the 

 other had not. To-day the difference is that one can 

 and will shoot and the other is sure to be shot. 



THE ETHICS OF HUNTING. 

 T)Y THE above heading must be understood the vindi- 

 cation of hunting on the plea that its pursuit is 

 necessary, or at least conducive to human welfare, and 

 before we have gone well below the sui-f ace it will be seen 

 that there will be no difficulty in presenting a strong case. 

 When man first came on the stage, and in every country 

 in which he made his appearance, the balance of life 

 between herbivorous and predatory animals was already 

 established, and the human race had to enter on a strug- 

 gle for existence with predatory beasts that sought to 

 make a meal of them, and to a less extent with frugivor- 

 ous and omnivorous animals that contended with them 

 for fruits and roots. For this struggle man had only his 

 intelligence and dexterity to pit against the superior 

 physical endowments of almost all his rivals, and in the 

 production of means to enable him to secure advantages 

 over them all his dormant intellectual and many moral 

 faculties were called into activity; even his latent sense 

 of art was stimulated into exercise by the accidental 

 results produced in his first rude efforts to fashion the 

 primitive club and spear. Driven by necessity to defend 

 himself and his children against beasts of prey, he 

 gradually acquired a measure of reliance upon himself 

 and his weapon, and what is of perhaps still more im- 

 portance, he learned the advantages of co-operation both 

 for attack and defence and for securing his prey, and 

 thus laid the foundation of social life and his recognition 

 of those mutual rights and obligations which are the basis 

 of moral law. 



The primitive hunting stage was the school in which 

 man acquired supremacy over the beasts of the field, and 

 had his faculties gradually cultivated for that intermin- 

 able struggle for supremacy between the several sections 

 of the race, which has subsisted for ages, and which 

 must for ages continue to subsist. 



Man's increase is limited by his food supply, precisely 

 as with other creatures, and as long as he depended on 

 the free gifts of nature and the spoils of the chase his 

 increase over the habitable globe was limited to approxi- 

 mately ten millions. This limit may possibly have been 

 reached by the offspring of a single pair of parents in a 

 thousand years, in which period man's education was not 

 yet so far advanced that he could provide for his own 

 further increase by cultivating the earth, and his choice 

 lay between the two alternatives of consuming all avail- 

 able food and dying wholesale of starvation, or of resort- 

 ing to tribal wars to keep his numbers down. 



Civilization has materially widened the horizon. The 

 earth has now a population of seventeen hundred millions, 

 and is perhaps capable of supporting four times that 

 number, but the Germanic nations alone, at present rate 

 of increase, would multiply so much in five hundred 

 years that after trampling out all other races their progeny 



would not have a square yard of earth per man for stands 

 ing and working room. 



There can then be no relaxation of the severity of the 

 struggle. Sclav and Tartar and Latin races are not going 

 to bow themselvespolitely out of the earth to make room 

 for us, and even if they were kicked out, it would 

 scarcely afford a breathing space before the several sec- 

 tions of the Germanic races would be engaged in a death 

 struggle with each other, the tendency of the struggle 

 being inevitably to secure the survival of the fittest in- 

 tellectually and morally. Frequent unnecessary wars, 

 provoked by the fighting instinct in man, or by jealousies, 

 or whatever cause, impose such checks upon increase of 

 population that ages may elapse before the two Americas 

 shall be filled up with such a dense population as would 

 necessitate an universal struggle for existence. For these 

 inevitable wars the hunting field is the best training field* 

 It improves a man's physique, gives him readiness of hand 

 and eye, familiarity with weapons of war, inures him to 

 hardship, and gives him that self-reliance born of assured 

 skill in the handling of his weapon which is so much 

 conducive to victory. 



We think a woman is never more lovable and wom- 

 anly than when she shows tender pity for the beast or 

 bird deprived of its innocent life in the hunting field, 

 but realizing that w r ar may come upon us at any moment, 

 that war with foreign powers, sectional wars or class 

 wars at home are all possible, and that war in some shape 

 is necessary to the working out of human destiny, we 

 can only regard as a very hopeful national characteris- 

 tic the prevalence of those warlike instincts which find 

 healthy and innocent vent in the hunting field. We say 

 innocent advisedly, for the predatory animals being de- 

 stroyed, man must usurp their duties, keeping the herbi- 

 vorous animals within due bounds, if only for their own 

 well-being. The non-predatory game, both beast and 

 bird, should be preserved jealously. The uncertainty of 

 life detracts nothing from their enjoyment of it and their 

 pursuit is as already said a valuable discipline and pre- 

 paration for the sterner struggle by means of which the 

 human race will be elevated by the survival of the fittest. 



Hunting must then, we contend, be admitted to have 

 an ethical basis, and it is not without a certain amount of 

 self-complacency that we see the people of this country 

 as a whole so enthusiastic for field sports as they unques- 

 tionably are. The United States at any rate is not 

 likely to drop out of the struggle for existence so long as 

 the love of hunting continues a leading characteristic, 

 and its people display sufficient foresight and self-control 

 to provide for the maintenance of their game by prudent 

 legislation. 



PUBLIC TROUT IN PRIVATE STREAMS. 



IN our fishcultural column will be found a reference to 

 a question which has been privately discussed several 

 times, but on which little has been publicly said. We 

 refer to the stocking of private streams with trout at 

 the expense of the State. As will be seen by the article 

 referred to, some of the anglers of Connecticut have pro- 

 posed to make a test case of their alleged rights to fish 

 in waters which are stocked at the expense of the peo- 

 ple at large. This is an interesting point, and one which 

 we would be glad to see brought before the courts for 

 decision. We do not know that there is any law on the 

 Bubject, but there is a feeling among some of our anglers 

 that whenever trout are planted by the State the public 

 should have the right of free fishing. This is a question 

 which the Fish Commissioners of New York should con- 

 sider, and about which they ought to give definite orders 

 to their superintendents. The earlier Commissioners, 

 Messrs. Seymour and Roosevelt, considered that the 

 stocking of private waters added to the food products of 

 the State, but were cautious about doing it extensively, 

 thereby showing their doubt about the correctness, or 

 the legality of placing the fish where they would only 

 benefit certain individuals. From time to time com- 

 plaints have been made against this form of stocking- 

 waters, but no action has been taken to test the right of 

 owners or lessees of streams to close their waters to the 

 public, after stocking them at the public expense. It 

 would seem that the Connecticut club was not sure that 

 the law would uphold their action, or they would have 

 accepted the offer to test the question before the Su- 

 preme Court. 



By an inadvertence last week, the late J. P. W. Riley 

 was named as L. A. Riley. 



