A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1896. ] 
Terms, 84 a Vkar. 10 Ore. a Copt ! 
Six MO--TTHS. 82. f 
VOL. XLVIL— No. 16 
No. 346 Broadway, Nkw \ ork. 
For Prospectus anS-Jidveriising Rates see Page iv. 
The Forest and Stream is put to press 
on Tuesdays Correspondence intended for 
publication should reach us by Mondays and 
as much earlier as may be practicable. 
^ ''forest and stream office 1 
346 Broadway i 
NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING 
Present Entrance on Leonard Street 
AUDUBON BIRD PLATES. 
The first subject of the series of half-tone copies of Audu- 
bon'd famous bird portraits was that of the Black Duck, in 
the issue of Sept. ;<i6. The second one will be of the Prairie 
Hen (pinnated grouse), next week, Oct. 24. 
These reproductions are exciting great interest and are re- 
cpived with gratifying appreciation, as many letters coming 
to us testify. Among others, one which gives us special 
pleasure is this: 
Editor Forest and Stremn: 
In your issue of Sept. 26 I notice your beautiful picture of 
the Black Duck and the announcement you make that it is 
one of a series to be published. * * « The reproductions 
are to ine most satisfactory; they lack color, of course, but 
in every other respect are the best we have ever seen, and 1 
think I may say that those of the A.udubon family still re- 
maining are much gratified with the first of the series, 
M. It. Audubon. 
CONOERNING THE EXTERMINATION OF THE 
DOG. 
A DISTINGUISHED essayist of England advances the prop- 
osiiion, and defends it at length, that the dog should be ex- 
terminated from the face of the earth. She concedes all 
that the dog is as man's best friend; full account is made of 
his utility and value as guardian of home and flock and per- 
son, as draft animal and beast of bmden, as adjunct of the 
chase, as affectionate companion; but against all this is put 
the terrible and unanswerable indi' tment that with the dog 
originates the scourge of rabies and hydrophobia, and the 
verdict reached is that the woe thus brought upon the 
human race by the dog outweighs a thousandfold all ibe 
good there is in him, The dog and. rabies are inseparable; 
Pasteurism has not stamped out the dread disease and gives 
no promise of ever stamping it out. Nothing is more cer- 
tain than, that so long as there shall be dogs there will be 
rabies, it rabies hydrophobia, and if hydrophobia then 
human death caused by it. Human life is worth more than 
all the dogs in the world; better, the dog exterminated 
utttrly than that the iives of men and women and ch.ldren 
should be sacrificed by reason of it. 
If we shall grant all that is here premised as to the ravages 
ot hydrophobia, and if we assent baldly to the proposition 
ihat the dog does keep alive in the world and transmit from 
generation 10 generation of humanity the disease of hydro- 
phobia, if indeed the dog be altogether as black as he is 
painted, the proposition to exterminate him will yet have no 
general practical interest, and the alarmist who would ring 
the universal death knell of the canine race will be heaid 
with indifference or at the best will be looked upon curiously 
as a faddist. The reason of this is found in the fact that the 
world at large knows noihing of the dog as a rabid creature 
and an agency of human disease and death. For one indi • 
vidual who in his personal experience or observation finds 
reason to dread the dog as possibly subject to madness and 
potentially fatal to human beings, there are a million who 
Know the dog only as a friend, companion and the play- 
mate of children, a creature not only harmless, but lovable 
loved and loving. Thus in the popular estimate, which 
is the estimate made up of the million individual?, 
the dog does not stand for a menace to the well-being 
of mankind, but on the contrary for a useful and beneficent 
factor in civilization. This, we repeat, is because popular 
knowledge and experience are of the dog as a blessing, not 
as a curse. Men have been gored to death by vicious bulls. 
yet the world at large regards domestic cattle as a valuabl^ 
and harmless possession, and the bovine race is not doomed 
to ' xtermination. Men are killed by horses, but the popular 
estimate based upon the common experience with the horse 
does not demand the obliteration of the equine race as dan- 
gerous to mankind. More than 7,000 persons are killed 
annually by the railroads of this country, and 40,000 others 
are injured ; but the popular estimate of the safety of railroad 
travel in general is based upon the experience of the 
500,000,000 passengers who travel annually on railroads in 
security, and he would be considered a candidate for an in- 
sane asylum who should advocate the abolition of railroads 
by contending, after the manner of this woman who wants 
us to do away with the dogs, that so long as we shall main- 
tain railroads there will be accidents and deaths caused by 
them. 
The question of dog extermination therefore is in no de- 
gree a practical one, but is purely academic, and as such to 
be discussed only theoretically and speculatively. It is a 
theme which would have delighted Sir Thomas Browne, 
who might well have employ'ed in its consideration some of 
the speculations advanced by him in his "Enquiry into Vulgar 
and Common Errors" (published in 1646), in the chapter devot- 
ed to the phoenix. "That there is but one phoeoix in the world , 
which after many hundred years burneth itself, and from 
the ashes thereof ariseth up another, is a conceit not new or 
altogether popular, but of great antiquity," he writes; and 
then he proceeds to an examination of the writings of the 
ancients— Greeks, Romans, Jewish rabbis, Arabians and 
Egyptians— and to a refutation of the stories of antiquity 
concerning the fabulous bird, bringing all the resources of 
his speculative philosophy to bear to disprove its existence, 
and carrying the argument back finally to the days of Noah 
and thence to the Garden of Eden and the Creation. As for 
the assertion that there is but one phojaix in the world at a 
time, each successive individual rising from the ashes of the 
one that lived and died before it, this, he says, "seemeth not 
only repugnant unto philosophy, but also Holy Scripture, 
which plainly affirms there went of every sort two at least 
into the ark of Noah." Moreover he argues: 
"It infringeth the benediction of God concerning multiplication. 
God blessed Ihem, saying, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and All the wa- 
ters in -the seas, and let fowl multip y in the earth;' and again, 
'Bring forth with thee every living thing, that they may breed abun- 
dantly m the earth, and be fruiiful and multiply upon the earth, 
which terms are not applicable unio the phoenix, whereof there is 
but one in the world, and no more now living than at the first bane- 
diction. For, the production of one being the destruction of another, 
although they produce and generate, they increase not and must not 
be said to multiply, who do not transcend an unity." 
This was a sockdologer for the phoenix, aijd it would be 
a sockdologer for the impious advocate of dog extermination 
who would kill off the tribe of dogs and thereby "infringe 
the benediction concerning multiplication." 
Practically, however, should man as lord of creation 
make up his mind to do for the dog, he would not be re- 
strained from putting his purpose into execution by any 
regard for "the divine benediction" to the canine race to 
increase and multiply. Alexander Ross, who believed in 
the existence of the phoenix, and undtrtook to reply to 
Browne, accounted for the fact that no one had ever seen 
the bird by iis exercise of that instinct which taught it to 
keep out of the way of man. "For had fleliogabaUis, that 
Roman glutton, met wilh him, he had devoured him, though 
there were no more in the worJd " Whatever may be said 
of Ross's faith in the ptceaix, he certainly understood 
human nature. If the profiigate Heliogabalus could have 
secured the brain of the phoenix for a tidbit he would have 
gobbled it up, and with the greater gusto that it was the 
only one left, 
History has demonstrated again and again that when 
man, "the great tyrant of the creatures," has the opportu- 
nity to destroy an animal, though there be no more in the 
world, he surely does so. It is only the species whose instinct 
teaches them to keep out of the way of mao, and which 
are fitted successfully to flee before him, that can keep 
their place on the earth. Creatures like the great wing- 
less birds, which men can get after with a club, fall bf- 
fore him and perish from the land. Where is the dodo? 
Giubbed off the earth. "V^here is the great auk? Clubbed, 
the very last one. Where are the seals? Clubbed from 
most of the earth's surface; and we have been discussiig 
in international boards of abitration — ten or twelve bound 
volumes of talk— and appointing investigating commis- 
sions, and taking statistic?, and dickering over the 
VMiMs Vivendi, and nevertheless all the time keeping up 
the clubbing, until who knows what the seal supply is to- 
day and what it will be next year, or how short the time 
when there will be no supply at all? Does any one believe 
that the man who shall have the fortune to club to death the 
last seal is going to feel anything but brutish joy at the 
thought of such a feat to brag about? And if Alexander 
Ross were writing to day, would not his opinion of the old 
Roman Emperor hold good as to the human wolves who are 
slaughtering the buffalo of the National Park? 
The extreme rarity of a bird or other animal, instead of 
being accounted a reason for protection, is regarded as afford- 
ing an added stimulus to its capture and destruction. Let a 
bird stray from its customary range, and, diverging from the 
limits laid down for it in the books, adventure new haunts, it 
has crossed a dead-line and flies to certain death ; the collect- 
or, man or boy, awaits it with gun and powder, and a 
museum ticket labeled "Rare." The rarer the species, the 
more eager the pursuit of It; if a pair were thought to be the 
sole survivors of their kind, the collectors would shoot one 
another in their mad scramble to bag the last one. 
Hehogabalus has been dead these two thousand years, but 
his spirit oi remorseless, cruel, unjiparing selfishness is alive 
in the world to-day, as the record of one' and another oblit- 
erated species of animal life demonstrates. 
RAIL FROM FROGS. 
There is a widespread belief that the immense numbers of 
sora or Carolina rail which make their appearance on the 
marshes all of a sudden come from frogs. Before the skeptic 
shall scout the notion, let him consider the evidence in its 
support. This is what the defenders of the theory say : 
In the first place, rail and frogs are found in the same 
marshes, but not together. One day it is all frogs and no 
rail, and the next all rail and no frogs. Where then did the 
frogs go to if they did not turn into rail? and where did the 
rail come from if .they are not transmogrified frogs? 3ait 
are poor flyers, as every one knows who has flushed them on 
high tides; and it is clearly impossible for them to have come 
by flight from a distance to the grounds where they appear so 
suddenly and without warning. If there was not the frog 
theory to fall back upon in explanation of their origin we 
might assume that, like the mice of the Nile fields, they 
come from the mud; in which case it would be with the rail 
as Theophile Gautier said of certain insects which are 
hatched from eggs, that knowing no parents they may thin 
themselves the direct children of the earth. Moreover, th 
frog-rail theory has all the dignity of age. Alexander Wil 
son, the lather of American ornithology, recorded that the 
belief was current in the early years of the century, and he 
tells a story of a planter who dug out of the mud a creatur 
half-frog and half-rail— nothing less, that is to say, than th 
frog turning into the rail. Wilson also asserted that the 
people in his day believed that the birds buried themselves in 
the mud, although, as he pointed out, while ditchers and 
dredgers frequently carried on their operations in this mud , 
none of them was ever known to dig out any of the birds. 
Mr. Lowry, however, whose notes in another column have 
brought this subject to attention, tells us of guides living at 
points far distant from one another, who while digging for 
muskrals in the marshes have exhumed quantities of rail. 
Those who contend for the frog origin of the birds have at 
least a;rounds for their theory as substantial as those upon 
which are based the long-standing beliefs that swallows bury 
themselves in the mud for the winter and that some snakes 
sting with tiieir tails. 
The belief is likely to hold for another hundred years. It 
is purposeless to cite against it the perfectly well-known 
facts of ornithology which have been determined with re- 
spect to the rail, that it is a migratory bird passing to and 
from north and south, from the British Possessions to Central 
America, nesting in northern latitudes from Massachusetts 
to Fort Rae, building nests and laying eggs, which nests 
and eggs are perfectly well known 10 naturalists; and that 
as to its powers of flight it is so good a bird on the wing 
as to pass annually in spring and autumn to and from Ber- 
muda, a distance of more than 500 miles over the Atlantic ; 
aod moreover, that it has been taken on ships at sea 300 
miles from land. These facts might be printed in every 
journal in the land regularly, year in and year out, but they 
would not shake the confiJence of the native in his frog 
theory; he has it firmly fixed in his noddle that rail come 
from frogs, and this he will stick to. Of him it may be said 
as Sir Frederick Thesinger said to the man who addressed 
him as "Mr. Smith, I believe." "If you believe that," was 
the retort, "youwoul i beli°ye anything," 
