Forest and Stream; 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
''''''''''^%r^Ii;^^nsr$^J'- NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 1898. Uo. ..e^'^hJ^^I.^^ yo... 
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ajv extraordinary resolution. 
An extraordinary resolution was adopted by the Amer- 
ican Society of Naturalists, at Ithaca last week, declaring 
it to be the sentiment of the members of the convention 
that the position of United States Fish Commissioner 
should be filled only by a competent scientific man. 
Ordinary every-day common sense suggests that the 
Fish Commissioner should be a competent scientific per- 
son. 
Approved business principles demand that he should be 
a competent scientific person. 
Those who established the Commission and directed 
its course in the early years of its usefulness contemplated 
that at the head of it should always be a competent scien - 
tific person. 
The law providing for the office of Commissioner re- 
quires that the President shall appoint to it only a com- 
petent scientific person. 
The extraordinary character of this resolution of the 
naturalists at Ithaca then is that, with common sense, 
accepted business axioms, and the letter of the statute 
itself all requiring these qualifications on the part of a 
Commissioner, any such expression of opinion should 
have been called for. It was demanded only by a most 
extraordinary situation. The President proposes to hand 
over to an incompetent and ignorant individual a great 
public trust; and this is in violation of the law. At such 
a juncture it was well for the Society of Naturalists to 
take the action it did. The sentiment expressed at 
Ithaca should be indorsed and re-echoed from every quar- 
ter of the land, until President McKinley shall compre- 
hend that his proposed naming of a West Virginia pol- 
itician to be United States Fish Commissioner would be 
as much a defiance of public sentiment as of the law. 
SOME ONE ELSE'S RESPONSIBILITY. 
Writers — and talkers too for that matter — are accus- 
tomed to speak of sportsmen as if they were a class apart 
from all other men, possessing qualities and character- 
istics which are peculiarly their own. Thus the true 
sportsman is said to be generous, kindly, hospitable, 
highly bred, truthful, the soul of honor; in fine, one of 
those noble men of nature of whom we often read, and 
whom we sometimes see. If we are to believe the writers 
alluded to, all these qualities pertain to the "true sports- 
man" by reason of his sportsmanship; in other words, 
because a man is fond ^f shooting, fishing or yachting, 
he is therefore raised on a pinnacle above his fellow men. 
Could anything be more ridiculous than such an assump- 
tion? 
To tell the truth, the sportsman is just a plain, common 
man, and the fact that he finds his highest pleasure in 
shooting, fishing or yachting has nothing in the world 
to do with his mental or his moral attributes. If he pos- 
sesses those qualities which cause a man to be liked and 
respected, he will be popular; if he is by nature a cur- 
mudgeon, his sportsmanship will not save him from the 
condemnation of his fellows. His being a sportsman is 
only an incident of his life. 
Sportsmen are just as human as printers, drygoods 
clerks, railway engineers, doctors, lawyers and actors. 
In no way is this better shown than in the way in which 
they strive to place on the shoulders of others the respon- 
sibility for their own acts. For many, many years the 
game of America has been disappearing with constantly 
increasing rapidity, and the reason, as is^well known to 
everyone, is because the wild birds and animals are shot 
off by civilized man more rapidly than they can increase. 
The number therefore grows constantly less. 
It is seldom, however, that we hear an acknowledgment 
of the part of sportsmen in the game decrease. Hawks, 
ov\'ls, wildcats and pot-hunters are cheerfully denounced 
for their share of harm. There has been invented that 
absurd story about the Indians of Alaska, who were said 
to have ruined the duck crop, and were roundly cursed 
for it. Next year we may expect to hear that the Klon- 
dike miners have invaded the breeding gi-ounds of the 
fowl and so have caused our bags to become lighter. 
But whatever the cause of the game destruction, it is 
seldom we hear any confession of complicity in it. The 
gunners of the North say that it is over shooting by 
the people in the South; those of the East declare that 
the destruction takes place in the West. But what of the 
great army of gunners spread over this country who 
pursue the wild creatures for nine months of the year? 
What is it that they kill? What of the thousands of guns 
and the millions of cartridges turned out each year by our 
factories and distributed over the land? What about the 
man who says, "Why, I used to go out every day except 
Sundays all thi-ough the shooting season, and I always 
got from twenty to forty birds a day; and now I am lucky 
if I get three or four. Where have the birds gone?" Or 
the other who says, "Why, I used to get a hundred can- 
vas ill a day and now I can't get twenty-five. I don't see 
what has become of them." 
It is time that this shirking of responsibility ceased and 
that shooters should face the situation and acknowledge 
that the reason that there are no birds to-day is because 
they have killed them off. We can't have our cake after 
we have eaten it. Unless some strict system of preserv- 
ing on a large scale is inaugurated in America or our 
coverts are stocked with exotic game, a time will prob- 
ably come when our native species will become so scarce 
in many localities that field shooting will almost entirely 
cease. When that takes place the birds will slowly in- 
crease again, but they will probably always be kept down 
very close to the vanishing point, and the time is likely to 
come when the quail, the partridge, the prairie chicken 
and the woodcock will be birds as little known to the 
average gunner as the wild pigeon is to-day. 
SNAP SHOTS. 
An electric wire case was determined in the courts the 
other day which has a bearing on fish nets. An electrical 
power company having been notified by the Mayor of 
New York to remove its overhead wires, unlawfully main- 
tained, failed to do so within the prescribed time, and the 
wires were thereupon cut down by the Commissioner of 
Public Works. The company then brought suit in the 
Supreme Court to compel the restoration of the wires 
or to recover damages. The court found against the 
plaintiff, and dismissed the complaint, holding that "the 
company had no right in the first instance to string its 
wires, or thereafter to use them, and not having availed 
itself of the opportunity to place the wires in the sub- 
ways it was the duty of the Commissioner of Public 
Works to remove them, as being a public nuisance and 
constituting a source of danger to person and property." 
"It is a well settled principle of law," Justice McLough- 
lin said, "that an injury to or destruction of property 
necessarily incident to the exercise of the jurisdiction to 
summarily abate a nuisance interferes with no legal right 
of the owner, and is not violative of the constitutional 
prohibition against depriving the owner of his property 
without due process of law. Therefore any injury which 
plaintiff sustained by reason of the wires being removed 
from the streets by the Commissioner of Public Works 
is not actionable. When cut down, it was his duty to 
remove it, and thus clear the street of obstructions." 
The same principle has been laid down by the United 
States Supreme Court as applying to the summary de- 
struction of illegally maintained fishing nets. The New 
York statute makes it the duty of protectors "to seize, 
remove and forthwith destroy any net, pound or other 
illegal devices for the taking of fish or game found in or 
upon any of the waters or islands of the State where 
hunting and fishing with nets or other illegal devices is 
prohibited or illegal, and such nets, pounds or other 
illegal devices are declared to be a public nuisance, and 
shall be abated and summarily destroyed by any protec- 
tor, and no action for damages shall lie or be maintained 
against any person for such seizure or destruction." It 
was contended by owners of certain destroyed nets that 
the Legislature was without constitutional authority thus 
to sanction the destruction of property "without due pro- 
cess of law;" but the Supreme Court held that the pro- 
vision was well within the police power of the State, and 
in effect that the due process of law defense did not apply 
to the summary abatement of a public nuisance. Those 
net fishermen in the West who are planning to test the 
same principle in the courts may save themselves counsel 
fees if they will read the decision as printed in full text 
in our columns at the time. 
The attainment of Mr. Charles Hallock's proposed sys- 
tem of an uniform game season for all States lying 
within certain zones of latitude and longitude would be 
a great stride in advance; but until the time comes when 
such an ideal plan shall be feasible effort may well be 
directed toward securing at least an uniform law for 
each State. The New York League put on record the 
other day its opposition to local legislation, and anotlier 
movement in the same direction is now to be credited to 
the Maryland State Game and Fish Protective Associa- 
tion, which has prepared and submitted for discussion 
a bill to make uniform seasons for the State. In local 
legislation Maryland is easily ahead of any other State. 
Hardly two adjoining counties have identical seasons. 
The laws have been framed not always to comply with 
common sense, but sometimes to defer to local jealousies. 
Theoretically the dates of a close season are determined 
by a consideration of what will best answer the practi- 
cal purpose of the protected period, which is immunity 
and security for the game in the breeding and maturing 
season; and as the birds on one side of a county line 
have substantially the same nesting habits as those of 
birds on the other side of the line we might expect that 
the season most propitious for one would be likewise 
suited to the other. On the contrary, we find almost as 
many diverse seasons as there are county divisions.; and 
under such a system the enforcement of the Jaws has been 
found most difficult. The diversity of seasons and regu- 
lations renders it comparatively easy for offenders to 
evade conviction, and moreover there is a disregard of 
the statutes because of a public perception that such an 
inconsistent code cannot be based on reason. The State 
Association rightly considers that the first and most im- 
portant end to be sought in amending the laws is such 
an uniformity as shall simplify their enforcement and 
command for them the support of public respect. While 
there may very well be maintained differences of opinion 
respecting some of the details of the proposed measure, 
the principle of a general law for the State should be 
warmly encouraged, and we trust that the efforts of the 
Association in this direction rriay be crowned with suc- 
cess. 
As is the rule with all reforms, the enforcement of the 
game laws in New Jersey has been accompanied by nu- 
merous newspaper exaggerations and malicious lies, 
manufactured by those who have sought in this way to 
bring the service into disrepute. One of the most fla- 
grant instances of this nature is cited by the commis- 
sioners in their report. It was the publication by several 
newspapers of a story that four innocent girls had been 
arrested and convicted for having caged robins in their 
possession. For this we are told there was not the 
slightest foundation in fact. The persons actually con- 
victed and fined for taking robins were two Italians, 
who had for a long time been engaged in capturing 
birds, which they carried to New York and sold. The in- 
nocent girls were purely the product of fancy or mali- 
cious imagination. Whenever the newspapers come out 
with tear-compelling head lines and sympathetic stories 
of poor men sent to jail because, being ignorant of the 
law, they have captured song birds to while away in 
their humble homes the dreary hours of widowed lives, 
we may be reasonably certain that the New Jersey game 
wardens have at last brought to book some persistent 
violator of the law, for whom they have long been lying 
in wait. 
A series of five special postage stamps is to be en- 
graved for the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha 
next summer, and Postmaster-General Gary has invited 
suggestions for suitable designs. The series might very 
well show objects characteristic of the several stages of 
Western history. For primitive days the buflfalo or the 
antelope would answer most admirably for the first 
stamp; then the tepee of the Indian, the pack train or a 
prairie schooner, the log cabin or sod house, and finally 
the locomotive or steam plow or reaper. Any of these 
would lend themselves to the purpose very effectively. 
