Forest Stream. 
A Weekly Journal o 
Rod and Gun. 
C0PYRIGHT,|1899, BY FoREST AND Si. dUSHJNG Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. 
Six Months, $Z. 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 1899. 
} VOL. Ui. No. IT. 
I No. 84<J Broauwa*, Nkw York. 
fVOJ?Jir AND FLA V. 
The letter printed elsewhere from Mr. S. R. Harris, is 
characteristic of very many of those which come to us, be- 
cause it expresses the peculiarly pleasant relations exist- 
ing between the Forest and Stream and its readers and 
contributors. By a happy coincidence, on the very day 
that this letter was received from a member of the Bar of 
Ohio, our Tennessee contributor, who writes over the 
name of Lewis Hopkins, who also is a member of the 
Bar, and whom happy fortune had brought to New York, 
related how the Forest and Stream, with its stories of 
the experience of others and its promptings to him to tell 
his own, was the chosen favorite diversion which came to 
him in the week of labor. These two expressions are, as 
has been said, characteristic of the paper's relations with 
its readers and of the peculiar office it fills of the busy 
man's companion. 
Some who are outside of the craft and have not the 
clear knowledge which comes only with initiation into it, 
might scoff and sneer at the designation of a sportsman's 
paper as a special journal of "The Workers." Yet he 
must be downright ignorant and stupid who in this day 
confounds the typical sportsman or angler with the idler 
or the sluggard or the ne'er-do-well. The truth is that 
they most value the rod and gun, who find in the use of 
these implements diversion and recreation from the 
routine of toil. The most enthusiastic sportsman is quite 
likely to be one who finds but scant opportunity to indulge 
his favorite pursuit, who must needs plan and contrive 
far ahead for his vacation, and make the opportunity for 
it by plotting to steal time from crowded calendars; and 
who, when he writes of it for others to read in the Forest 
AND Stream finds in such recording a grateful realization 
anew of the actualities of the trip. 
The typical sportsman is the professional man who is 
engaged in the round of his profession, the business man 
immersed in affairs, the farmer, the student, the public 
official, the mechanic — the man and the men who are doing 
the world's work to-day and doing it all the better because 
they have learned that play too has its proper place m the 
economy of efficient work. 
We hold the theory, not here broached for the first 
time, but advanced before and confirmed and established 
by fuller observation, that those who make the most out 
of theil- outings in the field, on the waters, in the woods 
and in the mountains, who get the most from their day 
off, their week or their month, are they who have to 
plan most closely how they may break the chains which 
hold them to their daily rounds, and how by contriving 
they may achieve the opportunity for the vacation short or 
long. 
This is what gives field sports their dignity and worth, 
and causes every reflecting and right-thinking person to 
be jealous for the preservation of the game and the fish 
and the forests and the streams, the bird covers and the 
haunts of trout and bass. 
HUNTING KNIVES. 
The question of the form and material of the most use- 
ful hunting knife is t: subject which, while it is one which 
presents difficulties to the novice, is not likely to occupy 
a large place in the thoughts of the man who has had 
experience. He who is buying his first hunting knife, 
however, imagines that a great deal depends on it, and 
that imless he provides himself with a knife of proper 
appearance, his equipment is by no means complete. 
As has often been said, the hunting knives sometimes 
soldj"n the gun stores are an abomination for general pur- 
poses. This is natural enough, since they were never 
made for general purposes nor for the uses to which 
the American hunter puts the knife. They are a modifi- 
I cation of the dagger of the Middle Ages, a fighting 
weapon, which was a part of the equipment of every 
.knight, squire and man at arms, and they were used by 
ithe huntsman for a single purpose only, that was to give the 
Igame its coup de grace and to bleed it. In other words, this 
knife or dagger was a thrusting weapon. In those times and 
m those places the huntsman never wished to do more than 
to secure the game. The operations which we call butch- 
lering and skinning Avere left to the servants and the fol- 
lowers of the hunt. But in our land and in our time, the 
Aimter must not only kill his game, but must also bleed 
it, disembowel it, remove the skin, cut up the carcass and 
icarry it in whole or in part to his camp. For such %vork 
needs a knife adapted to a variety of operations. It 
nmst have a point for ripping, a broad, round edge for 
skinning, a light thin blade, short enough to be comfort- 
ably handled. Finally, it must be hard enough to re- 
tain an edge, yet tough enough not to break if it is sharply 
brought against a bone. 
The varying opinions expressed in our columns, and the 
different shapes of blades there shown, offer a wide range 
of choice for the man who has had a delicate taste in 
hunting knives. No part of his outfit is more essential to 
the hunter's comfort, if he is in a good game country. We 
confess to having a strong liking for a knife which exactly 
suits us, but we acknowledge also that it is often the 
case that those who are most finical about their hunting 
knives are the ones who have the least use for them. 
WALTON'S ANGLER. 
One may become the possessor of Izaak Walton's "Corn- 
pleat Angler" in return for the expenditure of the sum 
of ten cents, or of ten dollars, or of ten hundred dollars. 
What he gets in exchange for his money in each several 
transaction is Walton's Angler; and if one buys simply 
to read what Walton wrote he may find it as completely in 
the cheap copy as in the expensive. But even for the 
purpose of reading one likes to have an author in re- 
spectable and worthy dress. An extremely cheap book, 
that is to say, one which is cheaply made in material and 
workmanship in imitation of a more costly one, is an 
abomination which grows more and more abominable with 
time; just as on the other hand a fine edition is cherished 
the more dearly the longer one has the joy of its posses- 
sion. The safe rule in buying books we intend to keep 
is to select substantial well-made volumes, honest ma- 
terials used and artistic and dignified in the printing. 
And if the style of the volume in its material part shall 
comport with the character of the subject, the writer, or 
the time of its original publication, the outward dress 
being thus in harmony with the inner soul, so much more 
surely may the reader enter into the spirit of the author. 
Your Walton need not be an early edition— there are not 
many early editions left, and those that exist belong to the 
owners of long purses— but if it shall have something of 
the antique air answering to the quaintness of the book 
itself, an edition for instance like that of the Temple 
Classics, the reader may get much nearer to Tottenham 
Hill, than he will with some other copy, even though more 
stately and luxurious in dress. 
Book buying is like angling. It means diflferent things 
to dififerent people, and has in it a multiplicity of gratifica- 
tions answering to varied tastes and various desires. No 
hard and fast rules may be laid down for book buying, no 
more than for trout fishing. No particular motive may 
be prescribed as the only permissible or worthy impulse. 
Nor may we quarrel with another because the pleasure he 
finds in his books or in his fishing is not the pleasure we 
discover in our own. Most of us buy books as we catch 
fish, for the double purpose of food and entertainment. 
There are those who invest in books together with rugs and 
paintings and bric-a-brac for house furnishing, without 
ever knowing what is inside the covers ; and as little does 
the conventional angler, the fisherman to be in fashion, 
ever get at the heart of angling. 
There was sold at auction in this city last week a copy 
of Walton, which brought $2,870. It was not one of the 
first editions, but that published by William Pickering, 
London, 1853. The Pickering edition, in two volumes' 
was an imperial octavo, published in parts, as a subscrip- 
tion work. It was a superb edition, elaborately illus- 
trated with engravings on steel and copper, and volumi - 
reus in notes by the editor, Sir Harris Nicolas. West- 
wood, in his -Chronicle of the Compleat Angler," de- 
scribes it as "one of the handsomest publications of mod- 
ern times, an ornament to the angler's library, unique of 
its kind, and perhaps destined to remain' so." The copy 
sold in New York last week had been extended by the 
insertion of extra illustrations from the original two 
volumes to seven; it was beautifully bound in green 
crushed Morocco, and each volume was encased in 
a chamois-lined case. It -was the book in the collection, 
that of Mr. Henry F. Cox, which excited the most lively 
competition and brought the highest' pMee. 
The inserted plates numbered 1,762, and when it is 
considered how many other works in various branches 
of literature must have been rifled of their illustrations 
for the enrichment of this one, and 'ihow rare were many 
of the prints secured for the purpose, we may perhap'-i 
conclude that the seven volumes cost Mr. Cox in their 
making more than he realized from them at the ,sale. 
The task of collecting the materials must have consumed 
years of patient searching and acquiring, with much 
haunting of print shops and delving in many fields of 
book making. 
Walton is one of the works in all literature which 
lend themselves most graciously to the pursuit of the 
extra-illustrator. Not to begin to catalogue the various 
classes of illustrations which might be drawn upon for 
the purpose, there are the portraits of Walton and his 
friends and contemporaries, and of the numerous per- 
sonages mentioned by him, with the good anglers of all 
times and all countries, from Genesis to Forest and 
Stream; the fishing localities named, the fishes them- 
selves and their relations, the sports of the time, hawking 
and hunting, with the hawks and the dogs and the horses 
and the paraphernalia of the chase, the trees and the 
birds and the flowers and the flies and the baits and the 
tackle, and fishing scenes without end, as one may quick- 
ly discover for himself, if ever the print collector's pas- 
sion shall lay hold upon him. An astonishing range of 
subjects and undreamed of wealth of material will un- 
fold themselves before the devoted mortal who sets him- 
self to the task of illustrating Walton's Angler; we may 
not believe that Mr. Cox, with the 1,762 illustrations of 
his copy, had anywhere nearly exhausted the field; hut 
we may at least give him the credit of having made a good 
beginning, ^ 
SNAP SHOTS. 
Mr. Grin Belknap's recent call for gun-flints for his 
Hudson Bay antique developed the fact that the flints are 
still manufactured and dealt in for the supply of flint-lock 
gunners. This is an age of breach-loading percussion 
systems; and yet one has but to step just aside from the 
full swing of modern progress to discover that there are 
still thousands of muzzle-loaders used in the United 
States by classes of shooters who could ill afford the 
more costly breach-loading mechanism, ridiculously cheap 
though it be. In some other countries the muzzle-loader 
is the common and conventional arm. Our consul at 
Asuncion, Paraguay, Mr. Ruffin, reports large importa- 
tions into that republic of shotguns with ramrods, which 
sell for from $3 to $6, thus, so cheaply, that a good 
American shotgun cannot compete. Our South American 
sporting brother is behind the times with his powder- 
flask, ramrod, wadding and cap — so far behind that per- 
haps by the time he catches up with our present perfection 
of the hammerless breach-loader with smokeless powder, 
we ourselves may long since have passed beyond it with 
our liquid-air guns. 
For the first time in its history since a fish commis- 
sion was established. New Jersey is this year without an 
appropriation for fish stocking. The situation is due to 
the Governor, who- is consistently hostile to the fishing 
interests of his State, and whose attitude with respect to 
fish and game protection is determined by his petty per- 
sonal piques and prejudices rather than by any concep- 
tion of good statesmanship or any appreciation of wise 
economy. New Jersey has in recent years administered 
its fish and game affairs in a business-like and effective 
manner; the fish commission has given the people a re- 
turn for the moneys expended, and the wardens have ac- 
complished a vast reform in the efficiency of the protect- 
ive service. We of other States have been accustomed 
to point to New Jersey with some satisfaction for a dem- 
onstration of the possibilities of an intelligent conduct 
of the affairs of a fish and game commission. The State 
was doing good work, and the commission should have 
liad the usual appropriation this year to continue it. 
Michigan's Governor has yielded to the demands of the 
spring shooters and has signed the bill to permit killing 
wild ducks to May ist. This retreat from a place in the 
advance of wise game protection is a step which will be 
generally regretted; but the sentiment— or rather the 
common sense conviction so widely held— concerning the 
folly of spring shooting will not be weakened but in- 
tensified by the reactionary movement. The spring shoot- 
ing of migratory birds is something which in the very 
nature of things must be stopped, and will be stopped; and 
the general movement toward that end may not be stayed 
by the defection now and then of an individual State. 
