Forest and Stream; 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1900, by Forest'and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. } 
Six Months, $2. )' 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MARCH 3, 1900 
VOL. LIV.— No. 0. 
No. 346 bhOADWAY, New York 
THE NEW YORK COMMISSION. 
The New York Board of Trade and Transportation, by 
its special committee on forestry, consisting of Messrs. 
Edmund P. Martin, Simon Sterne, Wm. B. Boorum, 
John H. Washburn, Edwin S. Marston, Peter F. Scho- 
field and James MacNaughton, has prepared a bill for 
submission to the Legislature to provide for the appoint- 
ment of a superintendent of forests, fish and game, who 
shall take the place of the present board of five com- 
misioners, which board the bill abolishes. To the superin- 
tendent is given all the duties now assigned to the board; 
and for an executive force he is empowered to appoint 
three deputies, a State fishculturist, who shall be an ex- 
pert in fishculture, and shall have charge under the super- 
intendent of the culture of all fish and the conduct of 
all the hatching stations; a State forester, who shall be 
an expert in forestry, and shall have charge under the 
Fuperiiitendent, of all matters relating to the forests and 
game ; and a supervisor of marine fisheries, to have charge 
(if salt-water fish and shell fish and oyster protection. The 
existing system of chief fish and game protector and dis- 
trict protectors and foresters, it is provided, shall be con- 
tinued. The term of the superintendent is fixed at five 
years, with an annual salary of $5,000; the deputies to 
receive $3,000, and to be subject to removal by the super- 
intendent. 
The full text of the bill is printed in another column 
and will repay careful reading. It is a notable' step in 
the right direction. For one thing, it creates responsibility 
and makes possible the holding to accountability of a re- 
sponsible head. With a single individual commissioner 
we shall be spared a .spectacle like that one, when 
President Davis of the Commission advocated the iniqui- 
tous Section 249 to permit the sale of game the year 
around, and his fellow commissioners were compelled to 
disavow his act; and that again of 1896, when the same 
btltnptious mferaber spoke for the board as "officially 
recommending" the adoption of the amendment to nullify 
that section of the constitution which preserves to the 
State the forest lands. 
The system here proposed is in many respects an im- 
provement over the existing organization; but the reform 
does not go far enough. For one thing, no good reason 
offers for making the State fishculturist, who must be an 
expert, subject to the control of a superintendent, who, 
the probabilities are, will know nothing of fishculture. 
certainly not enough to direct the expert. The office 
of fishculturist should be an independent one; and this 
is the time to make it such. 
THE BROADER HORIZON. 
A MAN with a habit of life whose parts are made up 
of repetitions of acts day by day and year by year, may in 
time become almost automatic. He who so lives may 
have some powers of adaptation to new changes or 
may not, but in either case, the habit of life which cramps 
his thoughts, restricts his narrow field of action to certain 
places and acts through an indefinite time, and engenders 
prejudices against all else that is different, comes from 
living in a groove instead of living in the world. 
All men are more or less subject to the dominion of 
habit, but there is a wide difference between the habits 
of thought and action which give men greater breadth 
of view mentally with greater usefulness in the material 
affairs of life, and those which reduce' men to a life 
within a horizon limited by their homes and their business 
interests. 
In an environment of life made up of repetitions of 
daily acts which are unchangeable, a man will neces- 
sarily become more or less automatic in thought and 
action. His standards of measurements and values are all 
within his own narrow world. Things outside his little 
horizon are seen ' through glasses which distort. The 
sailor, long at sea. has a supreme contempt for the lands- 
man, and the older the sailor and the more he is at sea, 
the more firmly is he convinced that the landsman is an 
inferior creature worthy of nothing but contempt. The 
environment of the sailor has so engrossed his mind and 
his attention, and he has come to know his trade so well, 
>vith the immense benefits and value of ships constantly 
in his mind's eye, that the rest of the world suffers by 
the conparison, as he views it. On the other hand, the 
landsmen consider with amusement the whims of the 
sailor, though they may have equally ridiculous i4eas con- 
cerning each other. ' ' . • 
The farmer may believe that the dwellers in cities are 
effeminate and given to certain financial jugglings which 
are unjust to him. If he lives in a rut he will grow to 
believe that his prejudices are facts as immutable as the 
laws of matter. 
Habit ma}' become so strong after a time that it is be- 
yond the power of the man to break it. He thinks in cer- 
tain lines as he has been habituated to think, reasons after 
a certain habitual fashion, and reaches conclusions he has 
already established and believed from habit. 
Nothing is more conducive to life in a rut than living 
in the same way day by day without change. A man 
rises, eats, works, returns home, sleeps, meets the same 
people and hears the same things said in the same way day 
after day, till there is no stimulus to thought or action. 
There is no novelty because there is no change. 
There is no great breadth of mental horizon needed to 
the man who lives in a rut. He may be prejudiced in 
favor of so living because the rut is in evidence before 
him, while all other ruts must necessarily be worse be- 
cause he does not use them and cannot see them. 
Sections drift into a rut as men do. The West may, by 
self -communing, exalt itself above the East; the East may, 
by like process, consider that elsewhere all else is lack- 
ing in the essentials of civilization. The South may 
look upon the North as a section filled with men who 
swap jack knives and whittle out gimcracks, while the 
North, on the other hand, may be sure that the chief in- 
dustry of the South is the making of mint julips and the 
oporession of the humble black man. 
The man in a rut and the section in a rut are lifted 
out of their narrowness by change of environment. Rail- 
roads and steamboats are breaking up the ruts of sec- 
tionalism and individualism. People go East and South 
and North and West, and find that there is no ground for 
prejudice, and that there was much that was misunder- 
stood and much more to admire. 
The growth of sport has in like manner served the pur- 
pose of broadening views, destroying prejudices, correct- 
ing opinions and cultivating a greater charity, for men 
and women who journey to waters where fish are caught, 
or cruise in yachts, or penetrate into the wild haunts of 
game, break aWay from the narrow lines which mature 
into narrow lives, and thus avoid the dwarfed life of him 
whose horizon never changes, and which bounds his own 
house and his own interests. 
All that is to be said of travel as an agency of en- 
lightenment, broadening and cultivation of tolerance may 
be said of the sports of rod and gun, and more. For 
the sportsman tourist gets much closer to the heart of 
the stranger community into which he penetrates on 
his expeditions than does the ordinary traveler, whether " 
on business or pleasure bent; and this intimacy gives 
a sympathetic insight into the lives and characters of 
those with whom he mingles. The friendships which hold 
between visiting sportsman and host may appear individu- 
ally of slight importance in this respect, but collectively 
they have a tremendous influence, and an influence which 
is for good. 
WITCHES IN THE WOODS. 
In the Maine case of a man lost in the woods last 
autum.n, after prolonged search by hundreds of men had 
proved futile, recourse was had to clairvoyants. A Bos- 
ton woman went into a trance and described the spot 
where the body would be found. She described it very 
clearly; but the perplexing part of the proceeding was 
that the description was one which would fit forty-nine 
thousand different spots in the country; and although ex- 
peditions under her guidance were actually undertaken 
into the district where it was supposed that the unfor- 
tunate man had met his fate, no trace of him was found. 
The first Boston seeress was followed by other clair- 
voyants and professors of second-sight, male and female, 
but all to no effect. Where the skill and intelligence and 
woodcraft and perseverance of Maine guides and woods- 
men had been bafl^ed, the occult powers of city mediums 
likewise failed. Nevertheless, those good people of Maine 
who believed in the unerring certainty of the clairvoyant 
vision did not have their faith shaken. In all probability 
if other men were lost in other woods, other searchers 
would as confidently appeal to other clairvoyants, and 
other expeditions would follow them into the wilderness 
looking for "the spot." Belief in clairvoyant powers is 
ppe of the persistent phenomena of human credulity. 
Clairvoyants are represented in advertising columns in the 
daily papers of all large cities, and presumably they thrive 
or they could not afford to advertise ; and they will thrive 
so long as human nature shall remain the queer com- 
pound of sense and silliness it has been from the Witch 
Endor and is to-day. 
Now that the clairvoyants have been given recognition 
in Maine as a factor in woods exploration, why should 
not the Commissioners take official cognizance of them 
and recommend for the game law special provisions cal- 
culated to protect game against clairvoyant pursuit? For 
if any considerable number of the Boston clairvoyants and 
trance mediums should take a notion to rest themselves 
from the fatigue of their business by running down to 
Maine for a moose or a deer, it is readily seen that the 
effect on the game supply would be simply ruinous. The 
stock could not withstand the onslaught by such hunters 
— though the term hunter in this application, by the 
way, is clearly incorrect, for a clairvoyant would not be 
obliged to hunt, he would simply see where the game was 
lying perdue and making up to the leeward would butcher 
it incontinently. Moose calling, jack-hunting, water-kill- 
ing — no one of these could compare in certainty and 
eft'ectiveness with the simple seeing of the armed seer. 
We talk about pitting human skill against that of the brute, 
but what possible chance would the game have against 
an eye that could see through a rock? The bear in its 
den, the coon in the hollow tree, the grouse beneath the 
snow crust, the woodchuck in its hole — even the angle 
worm whicli he might fancy for bait — all would be but 
waiting for benevolent assimilation by this new and im- ■ 
proved sportsman from the Hub. Clearly, clairvoyant 
shooters should be barred altogether, or in States where 
non-resident license permits are exacted, the fee charged 
them should be at least five times that for the ordinary 
individual who has to see his game with his physical 
eye before he can pot it. 
But while an alert game commission, jealous of the in- 
terests intrusted to it, would thus discriminate against 
the clairvoyant as a game killer, it should not fail to 
enlist his services as a warden. Once let it be published 
abroad that Maine had organized a staff of clairvoyant 
game wardens, and every possessor of illicit game would 
tremble in his boots or quake in his moccasins. Cold 
storage boxes whose sawdust now conceals the contra:- 
band trout would beneath the piercing gaze of these new 
detectives be as transparent as so many of those cakes 
of crystal in which lobsters and fish are encased for dis- 
play on the counters of city restaurants. The trout jigger 
might not hope to jig undetected, for the trance warden 
would see him even in the act of jigging. Little would 
it suffice then to sink the September moose in the stream, 
for the all-seeing clairvoyant would behold it through the 
mud. In short, such a panic and sense of utter help- 
lessness would seize upon all evildoers, that one single 
second-sight game warden would do the work where forty 
protectors fail now, and the great problem of protecting 
the wilderness would be solved. 
CODIFICATION. 
The New York Legislature has adopted and the Gov- 
ernor has approved, so that it is now in force, Senator 
Brown's measure which codifies the forest, fish and game 
law. This is not an alteration of the provisions of the law 
as they were embodied in the former text, but is a re- 
arrangement, simplification and in many respects a clearer 
statement of the statute. In so far as tliis result is 
achieved the new form is decidedly an improvement upon 
the old. All the more then is the pity flint the codification 
is in so many respects bungling ami clumsy 
There is no uniformity of statements of prohibition as 
to close season. "The close shall be," "there shall be no 
open season," certain game "si in II not be taken" between 
certain dates, are the different formulas emploj'cd, when 
one form alone should have fjcen adhered to throughout. 
The grammatical construction and the punctuation are 
lame; and among (lie additions to tlie grotesque ornith- 
olog5' and ichthyology of the game law are "Wilsons 
(called English snipe)" and "lake trout." which I't is 
explained on a subsequent page "includes landlocked 
salmon and ouananiche." The next Senator who shall 
undertake the revision of the fish and game law would find 
it to his advantage to confer with the Regents of the 
University for advice as to the elements of grammar and 
punctuation, and with the State Fishculturist for his 
help in the designation of fishes by their names, 
