FOJlfiST AND STREAM. 



tOcT. 27, iM. 



AN OPEN LETTER. 



To Henry Austin, Esq., of the Suffolk Bar, Boston, Mass: 

 Dear Sir— You may have read the story ofthe eastern ruler 

 to whom came a farmer with the complaint that a soldier had 

 devoured one of his jnelons. "Bring him before me/' com- 

 manded the monarch. "Nowciithim open. If the melon 

 Is found, restitution shall be made. If it is not found, ofl' 

 goes your head." The melon was found and restitution was 

 made. When I was advised the other day that your book, 

 American Oamc and Fish Lams,* contained pilferings 

 from me, it was a simple matter to secure a copy, open it 

 and determine the truth of the charge. I found the melon. 



Portions of your work, I discover, have been stolen bodily 

 and word for word from my own Bonh of the Gavic La ii^s. 



Instead of giving me any credit for the appropriated 

 material, you have sought to palm it off on the public as the 

 fruit of your own honest investigation, for in your preface 

 you say: 



In prepariuK this work Ihe author has endeavored to nsake a 

 brief, hut comprehensive digest of the ganio and flish laws. The 

 material lias been derived from the Bevisod Stiitiites, Codob. and 

 the latest enactments of the respective States. 



Trusting that his invr-stigatiou may pru\ e acceptable and we- 

 ful, the author pretforUs the roF\ilt ol liis lalior. 



Since there is nothing to indicate that you Avcnt beyond 

 my book for your material, when your preface says that 

 "the material has been derived from the Revised Statutes 

 etc,,"' you probably mean us to undei'stand, "The material 

 has been derived (some of it with a pair of shears and a pot 

 of paste) from the Hevi.sed Statutes, (lodes, and the latest, 

 enactments of the respective States, as given in the JSook of 

 the (raiiii: Lan's, coinpiled from original sources by Charles 

 B.Reynolds." This slight inaccuracy of statement, Mr. 

 Austin, is deplorable, but less deplorable than other inac- 

 curacies to which I shall call yotii- attention shortly. 



I am not now complaining that you used for your digest 

 the laws given by me in the full text. Public statutes are 

 public property, any one has a perfect tight to use thera as 

 he will. But an esteemed legal friend, in whom 1 have per- 

 fect confidence, advises me that my arrangement of the 

 laws, my abstracts, my digest^s, belong to me; they are jny 

 property or that of those to whom I may sell them: audit 

 Henry Austin surreptitiously appropriates them he takes 

 what is not his. 



Doubtless every person who finds himself the victim of a 

 literary poacher, feels in some measure aggrieved, There 

 are circumstances connected with this case which have reas- 

 onably or unreasonably aggravated my sense of wrong at 

 your hand. Chief among these is tiie fact that the particu- 

 lar portions of my Bool; of the Game Lams whi(;h yoti have 

 appropriated with your shears are the very ones which 

 reqtxired the most labor for me to prepare. 



1q 1891, there being no acciirate compendium of the game 

 and fish laws (the Fiir Fi-a, and Feather was then as now 

 incomplete and unreliable), I determined to pro-vide one. 

 There was a legitimate call for such a work, and I thought 

 that it should be supplied from this office. The labor of 

 compilation promised to be arduous, but it was quite clear 

 that if the book was to be put forth with the FoRKST ANP 

 Stream's indorsement there must be assurance of its accu- 

 racy; and the only way for me to be sure that the compila- 

 tion was accurately done was to do it mj'self. I therefore 

 set about the work of preparing the Bool! of f/ic Game 

 Latvs—a, task which proved to be laborious, vexatious, tedi- 

 ous and difficult beyond expectation. Begun in Maj-, the 

 work consumed all available time to October. Some hint 

 of this was given in a note in the first issue, as follows: 



ACCURACY AND COMJ'J.ETENESS. 



The first qualities demanded of a co'mpendiura of laws are ac- 

 curacy and completeness. In the lack of any collection of fish 

 and game lawa having these riualities this nae was undertaken. 



The preparation of tl>9work has involved im examination of 

 more than 8(10 distiact original and amendatory acts, scattered 

 through multitudinous volumes of the compiled statutes and 

 session laws of the fifty-nine States, Territories and Provinces 

 here represented. The labor of compilation has been largely in- 

 creased by the often careless and sometinioa saemiugly contra- 

 dictory nature nC Ibo legislation. It \voiild be presumption to 

 hope that in (he hxmdreds of laws here givva no miuor ei'vors will 

 be discoveietl: but it may at lea-st be said tlia t the JJuuA of Un 

 Game JjOWk as it appears to-day is the result ol: .i painstaking and 

 conscientious endeavor to furnish an accurate and reliable com- 

 pendium. Similar care will be exercised to give all fut\n-e euaet- 

 raents promptly and correetly. 



It is perhaps this recollection of the difTicul ties encountered 

 and the actual drudgery done in the preparation ofthe Booh 

 of the Gu inc. Laivs, which increases my impatience when I 

 find that some of the results of my labor have becu stnleji by 

 a member of the Suffolk Bar. Perhaps, however, considera- 

 tions of this nature, ba.sed on honest work, may have little 

 significance for one who adopts your speedier and easier 

 mode of compilation. Take, for an example, In the Book of 

 the Gatiie Lr/ ir.v, the condensed statement of the Connecticut 

 local fishing laws— upward of a hundred of them, the pre- 

 paration of which co.st me several days' work, be.sides cor- 

 respondence with public officials, and with persons familiar 

 with local geograpliy— as Mr. F. D. Bowen, of the New 

 York fnarpciident with respect to Woodstock waters. All 

 this you have coolly appropriated, the whole of it, word for 

 word, my order, my language, everything, in short, but the 

 bare enumeration of the sections. This application of the 

 shears you call "investigation.'' I .should .give it a shorter 

 designation, an "invidious appellation," to (juote an ex- 

 pression of Hume's. 



"True, were I given to vanity, there might be among other 



J' American Game and Fish Laics, Containing a Complete Digest 

 pf the Laws in eacn State, by Henry Arrstin of the Suffolk Bar. 

 An h or of 'American Farm and Game Laws." "The Liquor Law 

 m the New England States," etc. Boston, 1893, 



emotions excited by the detection of your wholesale "in^-esti- 

 gation" from me, a .shade of self -adulation that yon, a Law- 

 yer, should have had .such full confidence in my own, a 

 layman's, ]>resentation of the law as to indorse it word for 

 word; and that Henry Austin, of the Suffolk Bar, should 

 have stood .sponsor for the law book work of Charles B. 

 Reynolds, a newspaper editor, even to putting forth that 

 work over the authority of his own name. But I am a mod- 

 est man, and the compliment you have paid makes me feel 

 not an inch taller. I believe, however, that your confidence 

 inthejB(»o7f of llic Game Laies -was abundantly!.iustifi.ed, 

 for, if I do say it, the compilation was an hone.st piece of 

 work and now in its third year has stood the test of time. 



What is to be said of the acctiracy of your own publica- 

 tion? 



We are so in the way of going to the lawyers for our law, 

 and of accepting as the law what thej' tell us isthelaw, that 

 we naturally put confidence in a lawbook bearing on its 

 title page the authority of legal authorship. The American 

 Game and Fish Lei trs by Henry Austin of the Suffolk Bar 

 would therefore be accepted by the confiding public as an 

 accurate and reliable presentation of the law. Is it? 



1 have been interestedin examining the Nov. I , )S(>>, edition 

 ot your America)! < j am e and, Fish La/ies. not only to see 

 how much of it you originally "investigated'' bodily from the 

 Bodk of Ihe G<in\e l^aies, ))ut also to determine its in- 

 accuracy by coiuparing it with the current (October, 185)2) 

 issue of ray own work, in which the laws are correctly 

 stated as amended to date. 



The Nov. 1, 185*2, edition of \^xe. AmerlermFish and, Game 

 Lff's, by Henry Austin, of the Suffolk Bar, purports to 

 give the laws of W of the r>] States and Territories of the 

 United States. (It does not include Canada.) 



:$3 of the 1!) State and Territory laws are given incorrectly. 



That is to say, the errors in the book apply to 3:f States 

 and Terintories. 



133 game and fish seasons are incorrectly stated. 



74 game and fish seasons are omitted altogether. 



Uncounted errors relate to pro-visions other than as to 

 seasons. 



The seasons wrongly given or not .given at all relate to 

 Imffalo, elk, antelope, male deer, female deer, deer, Avild 

 turkeys, quail, ruffed grouse (partridge), pinnated grouse 

 (prairie chickens), sharptail grovi.se, wild geese, Avild ducks, 

 brant, snipe, plover, woodcock, rail, rabbits, reed birds, rob- 

 ins, tut^;le doves, larks, Mongolian pheasants; European 

 pheasants, trout, lake troirt, black ba.ss, mullets, red horse, 

 pickerel, pike, suckers. 



The uncounted errors additional to the season errors re- 

 late to hounding deer, killing game for market, privileges 

 of non-residents, exportation of game, sale of game, snaring 

 game, use of ferrets, use of sink boxes, use of blinds, use of 

 sneak boats, size of fish, fishing in private waters. There 

 are blunders even in the law of your own State of Massachu- 

 setts, and I»lunders by which an unlucky wight trusting to 

 you niight find him.self in seriotis trortble. 



Manifestly the only security, outside of a fool's paradise, 

 one might feel who should follow your representation as to 

 the fish and game laws woitld be in the good luck that he was 

 not in one of the 83 States and Ten-itories whose laws are 

 mis-stated, or that the particular law he was acting under 

 you r statement of did not happen to be one of the 200 and 

 odd you have given wrongly; or else in the good fortune that 

 the law was practically a dead-letter. 



Ton aj)pear to me, Mr. Austin, to be possessed of an 

 amazing degree of simplicity and of insouciance— for a 

 lawyer— in assuming paternity for such a grotesque collec- 

 tion of errors as is put forth in the current edition of your 

 American Game mid Fish Laws, But what astoni-shes me 

 even more, is that apparently it has never occurred to you 

 that any moral responsibility attaches to your happy-go- 

 lucky blundering; or that it makes the least difference in the 

 world whether you, a lawyer, .give to the purchaser of this 

 book — who is your client, so to speak — a truthful statement 

 of the law or not. You, an attorney and counsellor at law, 

 advise one man that he may not do a certain thing, when 

 the law itself di.stinctly permits him to do it; and you, a 

 member of the Suffolk Bar, tell another man that he may do 

 something when the law positively and explicitly declares 

 he may not do it, but shall be punished if he does do it. And 

 this sort of reckless, worthless and dangerous advice you 

 give not once but a hundred times. Take, a sample case, one 

 among those in Massachusetts, your own State, where you 

 arc practicing law, and where, if any where, you should 

 know the law and give safe legal counsel. With respect 

 to snaring ruffed grouse (partridge) you advise that 

 snaring may be done by land owners "during open 

 season only;" that is to say, from Sept. 13 to Jan. 1. 

 But the law limits the time for snaiing to the 

 period "between the first day of October and the first 

 day of .Tan nary." So here are fifteen days iu September in 

 which a well-meaning Massachusetts grouse snarer might 

 get himself into trouble by trusting to the advice of a Tre- 

 u\out street lawyer. And as a member of the Suffolk Bar 

 you tell the Ma.s.sachu,setts farmer's boy that he may trap 

 rabbits from Sept. 1 to March I, when for full three months 

 of that time the law forbids it. These blunders in your own 

 State law are good enough specimens of the misleading 

 advice you give in thirty-three States and Territories: but 

 they do not begin to be so serious as many others— in Xew 

 York, for instance. Why, I have jttst to-day telegraphed to 

 a State Game Protector to come here and aiTest a game 

 •lealer fof having on sale certain game which your book 

 ad\ises he may now sell, but the law says he may not. 

 Truly, the New York game dealer who should follow you in 

 this respect would .stand in need of a powerful "pull" unless 

 he should have Delmonico's luck with the District Attorney. 



Your work has been taken from the Booh of the Game 

 Lrms, and your work is full of mistakes. Does not this 

 discredit the claimed accuracy of the Book of the Game 

 Laios? Not in the least. You abstracted and scissored 

 your material from one of the first editions of the Sook, (for 



your plagiarism has gone long tmdetected by me). The 

 material was all right enough when you took it, provided 

 you ti-ansferred it accurately. But while revision supple- 

 ments of the Book of the Game La as have been issued 

 quarterly, its plates corrected, and the work in large share 

 reset, and thus "revised to date," you appear to have revised 

 the successive issues of your work only in part. It is as if 

 yoti should sell us an 1892 Farmer's Almanac with tour or 

 five 1801 months in it. Legislatures amend the laws, game 

 and fish seasons change with the years, but Mr, Austin's 

 A merican Geime and Fish Leiwsyjith pig-headed stupid- 

 ity sticks to the same old dates. 



Now, I trust that there may be no misapprehension on 

 your part nor on the part, of others as to my attitude toward 

 your work itself, intrinsically considered as a game-law 

 compendium. There is room in this country for an honest 

 work in that field by you as well as for my own honest work, 

 I believe in game and fish protection, and in facilitating 

 and promoting public information aboirt the laws. I con- 

 sider it an excellent thing for game protective societies to- 

 distribute the laws gratuitously, as is done, and well done, 

 in your own State, by the Massachusetts Crame and Fi.sh 

 Protective A.ssociation. (Send for a copy; the secretary is Mr. 

 R. O. Harding, -304 Washington Istreet, Boston.) The more 



fcame law compilations the better. But let us all make our 

 )Ooks honestly. For there are other laws, fully as im- 

 portant as these respecting game and fish, their observance 

 fully as binding. One of them is the rule of meuin et ta am, 

 collo(iuially, what's mine is mine, what's yours is yours; 

 and of the distinction between the two. This applies not 

 only to the new silver half-dollar in my pocket, and to the one 

 in yours, but to books that .sell for a half-dollar, like my 

 Book f}f the Game Lau^s, and to the copyrighted material 

 in such books. It applies to our dealings, one with another 

 —but I cannot believe that you, a member of the Massa- 

 chusetts Bar Association, stand in need of an elementary 

 course of instruction in ethics. 



I assui'e you that the sportsmen of this country require no 

 such teaching. When you shall know them as well as I do, 

 Mr. Austin, you vdll appreciate that they hate sham and 

 fi-aud, believe in fair play, give their support to honest en- 

 deavor and to work which is in reality just what it professes 

 to be on its face, and reward the man who does original 

 work, not the man who appropriates the original work of 

 another. Under these conditions, without taking into ac- 

 count the 200 and odd abominable errors in your American 

 Fisti and Game Lcb'ws, or ihe tried and proved accuracy of 

 my own Book of the Game Laies and of its younger brother 

 the Game Laws in Brief, there is no question in my mind 

 which of these will have the confidence and support of the 

 public— when once the public shall have found out your 

 jiilferings. If you have been hugging any fond delusion 

 that you would iiot be exposed, Mr, Atxstin, you may aa 

 well now abandon the very last shred of that fatuous trusty 

 Charles B, Reynolds. 

 Ot'pkjk o¥ Fouest akd SiEEAja, Oct. 24, 1892, 



To whom it may concern; 



The Book of the Game La ws published by us is a copy- 

 righted work. 



The pamphlet entitled American Game and Fish La iOS 

 (by Henry Austin of the Suftolk Bar, Boston, 1893), contains 

 certain material which is an infringement of our copyright 

 in the Boo?t of the Game La ws, which infringement, we 

 are advised by counsel, is actionable at law. 



All persons are hereby warned again.st selling or ofl'ering, 

 for sale the infringing work, as we shall take measures to 

 enforce our rights and protect our property. 



Forest asd Stream Pitblishu^g Co. 



ai8 Bboauway, New York, Oct. 24, 189,'. 



SPORT ON COLUMBUS DAY. 



Columbus Day, Friiiay, Oct. 21,, was a holiday in 

 Boston, and, in fact, in most of the New England cities 

 and towns. Not all of the boys followed the crowd or 

 marched in the processions, for a good many of the loverB 

 of the gun took the day in the woods. Some of the 

 devotees of the rod and line also went on the waters. It 

 is close time on trout now, but the catching of the big i 

 bass in the Sudbury River, an account of which was in 

 the Forest and Stueam last week, started the fishermen 

 anew. Mr. Richard F. Loring, agent for D. K. Reed & 

 Son, Chamber of Commerce, got up a hunting and fishing 

 party among his friends for Columbus Day, The party 

 was made up of E. M, Gillam, of the Boston Advertiser, 

 Charles Fairchild, formerly salesman for the Diamond 

 Paste Co., and Mr, Wilson, of Buffalo, N. Y., traveling 

 salesman for the same paste company. They started for 

 Foster's Pond in Wayland, on Thursday evening. They ■ 

 got into camp late at night, but managed to make them- 

 selves comfortable, with, the single exception that they 

 had neglected to supply their larder with a sufficient 

 quantity of food. It had been suggested that some one of 

 the party purchase the supplies, but in the hurry of leav- 

 ing business and getting started, no onie had really, 

 attended to a supply of food, though each one had pro- 

 vided himself with a rather small lunch in the shape of 

 crackers and cheese, etc. The result was tliat almost, 

 every morsel was eaten at breakfast the next morning. ' 

 But all were enthusiastic and each started out with the 

 determination of doing his part towards a game and fish 

 dinner. Two of the party tried the creek and the pond 

 for pickerel, but found the water almost too low to float 

 a boat in the creek, and very low in the pond, though 

 they had hired a boat for the occasion. They got no fish. , 



]Mi-. Loring and Mr. (lillam were out early after birds, ' 

 and with the help of a good dog, one belonging to Mr. 

 Gillam, Mr. Loring shot three partridge and Mr, Gillam ' 

 one quail, Then Mr, Loring was bound to try the gray 

 squirrels in the upland woods near at hand, and he suc- 

 ceeded in getting one. On making an inventory of their 

 provisions and game it was decided that if they had some 

 eggs they might do very well toward a dinner, though a < 

 chicken or two would help out and save the partridge to 

 take home. They started out in quest of the needed sup- 

 plies. Farmhouses were scattering and the people gen- 

 erally away from home. They could obtain no chickens 

 and only three eggs, fresh laid Mr. Loring bought them 

 for. These he brought back very cajefully. During 



