FO REST AND STREAM 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, 1901, bv Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
Terms, $4 a Year. 10 Cts. a Copy. ( 
Six Months, $2. f 
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, JULY 20, 1901. 
I VOL. LVII.— No. 3. 
1 No. S46 BKOAqwAY, New York. 
The Forest and Stream is the recognized medium of entertain- 
ment, instruction and information between American sportsmen. 
The editors invite communications on the subjects to which its 
pages are devoted. Anonymous communications will not be re- 
garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
conespondents. 
Subscriptions may begin at any time. Terms: For single 
copies, $4 per year, $2 for six months. For club rates and full 
particulars respecting subscriptions, see prospectus on page iii. 
SPORT AND ITS CRITICS. 
With a regular periodicity, which is about once in s© 
often, we have the deliverance of his message by the 
prophet who aspires to reform sportsmen, to turn them 
from the error of their ways, and to convert them from 
killing game. The preacher of the law of kindness to 
wild animals may not show any marked solicitude as to 
what may be the Divine view of his methods of pursuing 
and reducing to possession the almighty dollar; but. he 
is extremely concerned about what he thinks is the Divine 
view of the sportsman who pursues and reduces to posses- 
sion the quail and the grouse. He is always cock-sure that 
he knows just what the Divine view of this is, and he 
proclaims it with manifest conviction that he has a call 
to tell his fellow men all about it. One of these writers, in 
a periodical intended for the instruction and edification of 
young people, says : 
"If any of the sportsmen who pose before the public 
with records for having wantonly killed quail, grouse and 
reed birds, could be made to see nature in the nlanner God 
meant they should see it; if they could study the charm- 
ing domesticity of bird life, or could realize the love that 
the parent bird bears to its young, t-hey would never kill 
another bird. Birds do not sit quietly on their nests caring 
for their young all day; they have just as much work to do 
as any housewife, and they caress their babies jufet as 
often as any human mother." 
Unfortunately, sportsmen as a rule have no opportu- 
nity to study in the spring time the charming domesticity 
of bird life exhibited by the wild game they pursue in the 
autumn; but it is open to us all to consider the domestic 
hen, how devotedly she sits, how solicitious she is for her 
brood, how she "caresses her babies," and we may draw 
from the spectacle the same lesson that our writer tells 
us is that taught by the wild bird. According to the 
reasoning advanced, if in so contemplating the hen men 
"could be made to see nature in the manner God meant 
they should see it," and "could realize the love that the 
parent bird bears to its young, they would never kill an- 
other bird," of the barnyard species, at least. This would 
make an end at once of poached eggs for breakfast and 
chicken potpie for dinner ; we should simply go on feeding 
corn to the hens and crushed bone to promote their laying 
until the chicken tribe covered the earth. If the domes- 
ticity of the wild fowl is a reason for sparing the life of 
the game, that of the domestic fowl should act to the 
same saving end. If the sportsman is culpable for killing 
wild birds, mankind at large has no excuse for killing 
domestic poultry; and a writer who adjures the sports- 
man to forego his game, yet makes no protest at the 
slaughter of domestic fowl, strains at a gnat and swallows 
a camel. 
The fact is that these critics of sport are obliged to 
ignore the whole scheme of creation, which is an univer- 
sal and continuous bringing forth to a life of which death 
is the end. Millions upon millions of each distinct form 
of animated beings have lived their lives and died their 
death. Millions are living and dying to-day. Other mil- 
lions will live and die in the ages to come. When it is 
said that they live their lives, it is not meant that they 
live out the full span of life; for it is also a part of 
the working plan of nature that the rate of production of 
any given species must be checked in another way than by 
the mere dying of old age upon the completion of the 
natural span of life. Darwin writes, "There is no excep- 
tion to the rule that every organic being naturally in- 
creases at so high a rate that if not destroyed the .earth 
would soon be covered by the progeny of a single 
pair. ... In a state of nature almost every plant pro- 
duces seed, and among animals there are very few which 
do not annually pair. Hence we may confidently assert 
that all plants an,d animals are tending to increase at a 
geometrical raMoj that all wo*iM roost rapidly stock every 
station in which they could anyhow exist, and that the 
geometrical tendency to increase mitst be checked by 
destruction at some period of life." 
Man, himself a part of the inexorable system of life 
and death, is also an agent in creating life and destroying 
it. He breeds countless animals, which when bringing into 
life he foredooms to death — beeves, swine, sheep, goats, 
chickens, ducks, geese. He brings them into life, millions 
upon millions, only that he may destroy them. He breeds 
cattle because they give beef for him to subsist upon; he 
breeds poultry because chickens are good to eat. And 
except for Brahmins and vegetarians no one questions that 
in the view of nature upon which mankind acts in this 
respect men "see nature in the manner God meant they 
should see it." It is only when, turning aside from his 
butchering of droves of cattle and the killing of flocks of 
poultry, man goes into the woods and kills a wild bird, that 
these writers favor us with the special revealations they 
fancy they have of the Divine attitude' respecting the pro- 
vision of meat for the table. 
Now a ruffed grouse is good for man's stomach. Man 
cannot breed the grouse, although he has tried to do so. 
If he could raise grouse in captivity by the thousand and 
wring their necks and ship them to market, we should 
have no word of protest save from the Brahmins and 
vegetarians aforesaid.- But a grouse being good to eat, 
and man being unable to raise it in the poultry j'ard, he 
can nevertheless take his gun and dog and go into the 
woods where the grouse lives, and if his dog is a good 
one and his gun is properly loaded, and his eye is keen 
and his aim true and his nerve steady and the wires in 
working order between eye and brain and trigger finger, 
he can down that bird, and his dog will bring it to him, 
and he will smooth its feathers out and put it in his 
game pocket; and at night when he gets home and she 
meets him at the, door and asks him what luck, he will 
hand over that bird and others with it, with a glad smile; 
-and all in good time it will come on the table, and then 
as for that one particular grouse there before him, that 
man will be pretty apt to believe that he "sees nature in 
the manner God meant he should see it" — namely, done to 
a turn and with some wild grape jelly to go with it — a 
dish upon which he may with grateful soul ask a blessing, 
and with quite as much propriety as upon a refrigerated 
fowl of uncertain age and date of killing from the butcher 
shop. 
Reason, logic, common sense, indicate that the sports- 
man's view of game as something worth having and worth 
getting is the right one. Game is a thing good to eat, a 
part of the earth's produce for the use of man. Even if 
we class it as a luxury of the menu, and not an essential, 
its acquirement and use are none the less warranted — 
luxuries are necessities when one knows how good they 
are. 
Being good to eat, your wild bird must be captured 
before it can be eaten. "First catch your hare." Game 
being wild by nature, one may not seize a grouse and chop 
its head off as a barnyard fowl ; it must be hunted with a 
gun and shot in order that it may be reduced to posses- 
sion. When a. sportsman goes out and shoots a game 
bird, he is making use of that bird in the way in which 
we may say with all reverence the Divine plan contem- 
plates that it should be used. This has been the rule 
since man came on earth. Primitive man killed wild game 
and subsisted upon it, long before he had acquired the 
art of taming animals to his dominion and breeding them 
to kill for food. The rule will continue. So long as game 
shall be good to eat, so long will it be eaten. The prin- 
ciple that it is right to have game to kill is the basis of 
the game systems of the world to-day. We protect game. 
Why? That there may be game. Why do we want game ? 
To hunt it and kill it. In other words, the community , 
the state, provides for keeping up its game food stock, just 
as the farmer keeps up his poultry. Wild game bred for 
shooting and domestic game bred for the axe — it is all 
one in principle, in practice and in ethics. 
The pens which are busied in decrying sport— that is, the 
sport which consists in the pursuit of game — are enlisted 
in a hopeless cause. They would quite as profitably \m- 
dertake a campaign against the killing of domestic fowl. 
They may fancy in their egotistical obsession that their 
perverted view is to "see nature in the manner God meant 
they should see it," but the world never did and will not 
now take that view of it. 
SOME NAMES. 
The name of the "old-wife" duck is very ancient, older, 
indeed, than the occupation of the country by Europeans ; 
for the Indians before us called it the "old-squaw," and 
we got the term from them. How appropriate is the 
name you may know, if you have ever been waiting in 
your battery at dawn, when the mist lay on the water, 
enshrouding you as with a curtain, and from beyond the 
veil — weird and mysterious as sounds coming from un- 
seen sources in the fng always are — there has come to 
you the loquacious gabble of the old-wives exchanging 
their early morning gossip. * 
The name shows that the Indian had an appreciation of 
humor, when he recognized in the unending babbling of 
the wildfowl the garrulousness of his old woman. There 
is the same humor in the West Indian name, "old woman's 
tongue," which is given to a certain tree whose seed .pods 
played upon by the air are never still. Exciting to a smile 
too in its way is the West Indian name of a tree whose 
ripened seed pod explodes with a noise like a pistol, and 
which is called "the monkey's dinner bell," because when 
the monkeys hear the seed pod explode they gather to feed 
on the seeds. 
In striking contract with these humorous appellations 
are the names of somber significance sometimes given to 
birds and trees. In the Malayan Peninsula arc certain 
owls which share the world-wide popular ill-repute of the 
species as birds of ill omen and death ; and which are 
named from, the cries they utter. One of these "ghost 
birds," when it cries in the darkness, seems to say Cbarek 
Kafan — "Rend the doth for the shroud." Another says 
Toll Ka-tampi — "Old-man- winnowrthe-rice-for-the-burial- 
feast." And a third calls, Tumbok /(tro;i_v— "Nail the 
coffin." Much more cheerful cries in the iiight are our 
own whip-poor-will and chuck-will's-window. 
We have in all parts of America place names which are 
commemorative of the former Indian occupation, and ■ 
there is one tree name which is extremely suggestive to 
one who knew the old West and its people. This is the 
name of the "lodge-pole pine," so called because of the 
ex!tensive use the Indians made of it in setting up their 
lodges. The lodge-pole pine is found over extensive areas 
from which the Indian has long since vanished forever; 
but the musical name will long perpetuate the memory of 
the primitive, people who pitched their lodges by the cut- 
banks of the rivers in the valleys. 
The New jersey .Legislature in revising the game law 
omitted to make any mention of the deer, and it has popu- 
larly been assumed among the sportsmen of the State that 
the species was unprotected. But the July number of the 
Game Laws in Brief holds that so far from being unpro- 
tected at all, the New Jersey deer is by the statute pro- 
tected the year around. Deer are not specifically named 
in the law, says the Brief, but are protected by the section 
of the statute which makes it unlawful to kill any game 
animal, "excepting at such times as may be permitted in 
the act." The deer is a game animal, and no season for 
its killing is permitted in the act ; it is therefore protected 
at all times. We believe that this view advaaced by the 
Brief would be sustained by the courts, and if this should 
prove to be the fact, the protection thus assured to the 
deer remnent would be gratifying to all who have more 
sentiment than deer hunting ardor. 
Allusion has been made to the work of the American 
Ornithologists' Union in defining what are game birds, 
and in securing absolute protection for all species not so 
classed. The catalogue of game birds as submitted by the 
A. O. U., and very generally adopted, comprises : 
The Anatidae, cotnraonly known as swans, geese, brant, river and 
sea ducks; the RallidK, commonly known as rails, coots, mud hens 
and gallinules; the Limicolce, commonly known as shore birds, 
plovers, surf birds, snipe, woodcock, sandpipers, tattlers and. 
curlews; the GallinK, commonly known as wild turkeys, grouse, 
prairie chickens, pheasants, partridges and quails, and the species 
of Icteridae, commonly known as marsh blackbirds and reed birds 
or rice birds. 
The laws in which this classification is embodied pro- 
vide that oaly the species designated shall be considered 
game birds, and the destruction is forbidden of all other 
birds, certain ones, such as the English sparrow, crow and 
hawk, in certain States being excepted. In this most com- 
mendable manner the A. O. U. is contributing to popular 
education and the promotion of a right public sentiment 
to govern the taking of wiM life. 
