Forest and Stream 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Terms, $4 a Ymn. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $2. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 1897. 
VOL. XLVin.-No. U. 
No. 846 BaoADWAY, New York 
J^or Frospectus and Advertising Rates see Page iii. 
I' ' i 
i FOREST AND STREAM OFFICE ' % 
X\ 346 Broadway \\ 
% NEW YORK LIFE BUILDING \\ 
\\ ■ J f 
I k Present Entf ance on Leonard Street \ \ 
Take inventory of the good things in this issue of 
Forest and Stream. Recall what a fund was given 
last weelc. Count on what is to come next week. 
Was there ever in all the world a more abundant 
weekly store of sportsmen's reading? 
One affirmed that he had been in a certain 
Country^ where their Bees, were as big as our 
Sheep* This impudent lye one began to examine^ 
and therefore said^ Sure then the Bee-hives must be 
of a' huge bignesse*' No, saith the other, they are 
no \)i.%'gz,t than ours* How then can they get in? 
said one* This puzzled the lyar like a Mouse in 
pitch; at last he answered. Let them whom it con- 
cerns look to that. Fragmenta Aulica (1622). 
A PEBENNIAL GHEBB7 TUBE. 
A coEEEBPONDENT Sent US the other day two stories which 
had been told by a hunter named Kibbe, and told so often 
that they had taken a place in the local lore of the neigh- 
borhood, to be handed down from father to son as "Kibbe 
stories." In one of them Kibbe told how once, running 
out of bullets, he had shot cherry stones at a deer, and the 
next year had encountered the buck bearing on his frontlet 
a cherry tree; and the other story was of shooting at birds 
on a log, splitting the log and catching the row of birds by 
their toes in the crack. Both of these are fairly meritorious 
yarns, as such stories go, and the ingenious Kibbe, as the 
self-styled hero of them, enjoyed a pleasing fame while 
living, and dead was remembered as a hunter who could 
draw the long bow with the best of them. It appears 
never to have occurred to his simple friends and neighbors 
that Kibbe might not have been the original author of the 
stories he told, and our correspondent expressed a surprise ; 
which was no doubt genuine, when we advised him that 
we could not think of printing the Kibbe stories as new, 
since they were as old as the^ hills. 
The incident is worthy of note, because it furnishes a 
mew illustration of the well-determined proclivity of story- 
tellers to make themselves the heroes of ancient and 
travel-stained tales. This invention of the cherry tree 
sprouting from the head of the deer is at least a century 
old, for it is given in Miinchhausen, first printed in 1785 
and as the author of the Miinchhausen adventures drew 
much of his material from ancient stories, this particular 
fiction may have been contemporaneous with the dis- 
puted date of the invention of gunpowder, and the first to 
tell it may have been a Chinaman. But here in an Amer- 
ican village lived a genius who posed as the hero of the 
episode, and was, by his neighbors, given the credit of its 
invention; and there was found a writer to send the tale to 
Forest and Steeajm as something original, and deserving 
of a place in print. Thus the buck-borne cherry tree 
planted so long ago is a perennial, which has been trans- 
planted to bud and bloom and fruit in many lands, and it 
may be, is destined to flourish long after George Washington 
and his cherry tree shall have been forgotten. There is a 
flavor to this ancient humor which is just as acceptable 
now as it ever was. The same quality which has given 
the cherry tree life so long will keep it ever green. Gen- 
erations yet unborn will grin as Kibbes spin anew the 
old, old yarns in country stores of winter nights. 
There is just now going the rounds of our exchanges, 
and credited to a New York weekly, that old joke of the 
man who when out with the hounds could not hear the 
music because the dogs made so much noise. This is an- 
other of the long-lived, widely disseminated and always 
new anecdotes of the field. It may well be more ancient 
than the cherry tree story, for huntsmen followed the 
chase and were enchanted with the music of the hounds 
for ages before there existed such a thing as a gun for deer 
shooting. In the works of John Taylor, the Water Poet, 
published in London in 1630, appears a version, which 
runs: 
A Mayor that was a hunting (by chance) one asked how hee liked 
the Cry; a curse take the Dogs, saith he, they make such a bawling 
that I cannot hear the Cry. 
Since Taylor, like the later Miinchhausen, gathered some 
of his good things from Very old fields, this skit of the 
music of the hounds may have tickled the fancy of hunts- 
men of that distant age sung by the poet: 
"When Music, heavenly maid, was young, 
While yet in early Greece she simg-." 
QBEATEB NEW TOBK. 
The German way of saying What is the matter? — Was ist 
denn lost — has been taken over into English slang as "What's 
loose?" It is a fitting comment upon the annual flood of 
bills which pour in upon the game and fish committees at 
Albany. A list of the measures of 1897 is printed in an- 
other column; we do not pretend that it is complete, but 
the showing of more than sixty separate bills in the 
Assembly and one-third as many more in the Senate is 
quite enough to provoke the inquiry. What's loose? 
The measures include good, bad and indifierent. For 
some of them, notably the duplicate bills to repeal Sec. 
249, there was urgent need. Others, like Mr. Post's, to 
permit the use of floating devices for wildfowl in all Long 
Island waters, should not have come out of committee. As 
a matter of fact, this vicious measure was rushed through 
both houses and was the first bill to receive the Govern- 
or's signature. It was prompted by a market hunter, who 
secured its enactment that he might more readily kill 
ducks for the New York market. This Post law and Sec. 
249 (making an open market the year around) are- tpeci- 
mens of the game legislation we may expect for the 
Greater New York when the city shall be a State by 
itself and independent of the rest of the State. Under ex- 
isting conditions an unsolved problem of protection is how 
to stop the steady progress of game from the country dis- 
tricts into the city markets. Under the new order of 
things the market will be thrown wide open; and the new 
State, constituted of what is now New York outside of the 
Greater New York limits, will be compelled to provide 
and enforce a very stringent non-transportation system. 
INTBODTJG'IION OF EXOTIG SPEGIES. 
A CONSIGNMENT of jack rabbits was recently brought 
from Kansas for a game preserve in New Jersey; another 
lot has been contracted for to go to Long Island; and we 
learn that Maryland sportsmen are contemplating the 
stocking of certain districts in that State. The enterprise 
has been attempted before, but we believe without any 
pronounced success. The rabbits, it is said, increase in 
size in the East fifty per cent., but as to numbers the stock- 
ing experiments have not proved successful. This is due, 
no doubt, to the unsuitable conditions which so far have 
been encountered. The jack rabbit is a creature of the 
prairies; its subsistence is found in the grasses and other 
vegetation of the plains. The failure of the species to 
thrive in the East is accounted for by the reason that 
favorable food conditions have been wanting in the dis- 
tricts where it has been put out. Nevertheless, the fact 
that on his native heath the jack is classed with vermin 
and is accounted a tremendous pest should induce us care- 
fully to consider possible results before establishing him in 
a new country. In the States of the West the jack has 
wrought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage 
to crops, and vast sums have been expended from public 
treasuries in bounties for his destruction. Orchards, gar- 
dens, farm crops have been devoured by the jack rabbit 
hordes; the problem of coping with the pest is yet un- 
solved, and there is little promise that any adequate rem- 
edy will soon be provided. 
The individuals and clubs who are engaged in these 
well-intentioned jack rabbit stocking enterprises are actual- 
ly introducing into new fields a wild creature which is 
known to be a species of vermin, and vermin which under 
favorable conditions is destructive beyond calculation. 
The folly of this jack rabbit introduction will be commen- 
surate with the scale of success which shall attend the 
project. So long as the jacks shall be confined to game 
preserves and the private estates of those who are bringing 
them East, there will be no occasion for pubUc concern; but 
whenever it shall happen that conditions shall favor rapid 
increase — the jacks taking to their new food supply and 
having immunity from their natural enemies, the coyotes 
— we shall have the spectacle of communities casting about 
for means to rid themselves of the jack rabbit plague. 
This whole matter of wild animal importation and lib 
eration should be put under some competent and adequate 
supervision; it should no longer be left to individual whim 
and irresponsible impulse. There are salutary statutes in 
several States to prohibit the planting of new species of 
fishes in waters already stocked with food fishes without 
the consent of fish commissioners. There should be simi- 
lar laws forbidding the introduction of any bird or mam- 
mal without the approval of some authority fitted to de- 
termine the merits of the enterprise in view of the 
probable or possible effects upon agricultural interests or 
the native supply of game. Such an authority now exists 
in the Biological Survey, formerly known as the Bureau of 
Ornithology and Mammalogy, a division of the Agricultural 
Department at Washington. The members of the Survey 
are engaged in exhaustive studies of animal life. They 
have fully investigated, among other species, the jack 
rabbits, and their studies should have equipped them to 
form an intelligent opinion and to pass judgment with 
authority concerning the advisability of introducing these 
animals into new countries. States might profitably add 
to their game statutes a provision forbidding the introduc- 
tion of exotic species without the Survey's indorsement of 
the enterprise as harmless. Congress would no doubt 
make due provision to add to the duties of the Survey the 
new one of sitting in judgment upon the projects of jack 
rabbit and other vermin importers. 
YANKEE AND H008IEB. 
One effect of such affrays as that recent one which 
occurred on the ToUeston Club grounds in Indiana, where 
trespassers were killed by the club police, is to intensify 
the prejudice with which game preserves and game protec- 
tion are regarded in many sections. As a result of the 
Tolleston incident a bill was recently presented in the 
Indiana Legislature forbidding the setting apart of land for 
game preserve purposes. 
This is interesting and instructive as an expression of 
antipathy to the shooting preserve system; but there is no 
reason to believe that it represents Indiana sentiment at 
large. On the contrary, the general tendency of land- 
owners in Indiana, as in California, Ohio, New Jersey, Con- 
necticut and elsewhere, is to make more clearly defined 
and more stringently enforced their exclusive rights, to 
control their lands as they please and to keep off in- 
truders. 
The trend is in the direction of more rigorous trespass 
laws. Instead of the doctrine that an owner may not pro- 
tect his own shooting territory, the principle of his un- 
questioned right to do so is having wider adoption. In 
contrast with the Indiana anti-preserve movement is the 
action of the Connecticut Legislature last week when there 
came before it a bill to open to the public those streams 
which might be stocked with fish at public expense. The 
members repudiated the proposition. Connecticut farmers 
are willing and eager to have their trout brooks stocked 
by the State, but they propose to retain control of the 
streams because they can lease the fishing privileges. 
They hold out stoutly for the very principle which is op- 
posed by the Indiana anti-preserve agitators; and it must 
be conceded that in this the Yankees of the Nutmeg State 
show themselves shrewder than the Hoosiers. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
At first blush the connection might appear remote be- 
tween the bubonic plague of India and the game supply of 
McDonough county, Illinois, but the relation is not fanci- 
ful; for Dr. O. W. BlaisdeU, who has undertaken to stock 
Illinois with Indian game birds, has been hindered by the 
plague from bringing over a lot of chuckor partridges he 
had contracted for. Some of the chuckors previously put 
out, Dr. Blaisdell tells us, are known to have survived, and 
it is possible that from this feeble stock the race may be 
established. 
Norway and Sweden are intent upon making known to 
the world their attractions for the sportsman tourist; and 
at the Scandinavian and Russian exposition, to be held in 
Stockholm this summer, the sportsmen's exhibit will be 
comprehensive and prepared on a large scale. Salmon 
fishing, elk hunting, and other phases of sport will be 
illustrated. 
