Feb. 7, 1903.1 
FOREST AND STREAM, 
OS 
bank tellers. But men who have spent their lives in the 
fur trade still find an endless and indefinable charm in 
furs themselves. Doubtless the fact that they have been 
used since man first turned hunter, and so have become 
fixed in the popular mind as an object of desire, may ac- 
count in part for this admiration. But there is some- 
thing else, and that something is in part the vanity of the 
sexes, the love of ostentation, and desire to relieve the 
monotony of the human scenery. 
It is the fashion, of course, to credit the love of dis- 
play entirely to women. The assertion, therefore, that the 
basis of the liking for furs is woman's love of ornament 
in costume will find ready acceptance among men. True, 
the latter are always ready to march about in the uni- 
forms and regalias of this or that order, behind a brass 
band, indifferent to dust and the hot sun and the jeers of 
the street gamin. But men have always sacrificed them- 
selves to a sense of duty; and the cynical people who at- 
tribute this willingness to .contribute something of bright- 
ness and cheer to a dull and colorless world to a mascu- 
line love of display fail to understand our civiliza- 
tion. 
Nevertheless, that women do love furs as an ornament 
in dress will be admitted. Beauty is to them more essen- 
tial to successful getting on in the world than it is to 
men. Any article of apparel or adornment that tends by 
colors and contrast to enhance it, is, therefore, always 
admired. And as the color and lustre and richness of 
furs breaks the sombreness and monotony of ordinary 
costume and sets off beauty as nothing else does, the 
taste for them has taken deep root in feminine nature. 
No doubt their warmth has much to do with this liking. 
In the choice furs, such as sealskin and sea_ otter, the 
under fur is so close that small particles of air are held 
between the hairs, and this air is warmed by the heat of 
the body, while the fur itself acts as a non-conductor to 
the cold. The body of the wearer is thus inclosed in a 
miniature warm-air chamber. And though the coarse 
furs do not possess this quality, they still are warm 
enough to resist medium and even low temperatures. 
It may be questioned, however, whether if the beauty 
of furs were lacking, they would, as a mere protection 
from cold, attract womankind as they now do. As a 
matter of fact, much the same protection may be had 
from the lining furs, such as muskrat, squirrel, etc., or 
from fur clipped from the skin and woven into the cloth. 
One of the warmest garments possible is the sheepskin 
coat of the Russian peasant, woven with the wool inside. 
But though men wear furs manufactured in this fashion, 
women do not; and it is probable that men wear them 
only because of their diminished cost, and because in 
their work furs worn outside would speedily be destroyed. 
One charm of furs for the gentler sex is therefore that 
they gratify the taste for ornament and ostentation; 
though that men are exempt from this attraction there is 
no reason to believe. True, there is among the masses a 
prejudice against their use by men, as there is against the 
wearing of much jewelry, and for the same reason. But 
the rich and the cultivated wear them as far as custom 
will justify; and were prejudice removed, the leisure 
class would no doubt use them largely. As it is, men 
buy furs for women to wear; and though they may do 
so from desire to please their wives and daughters, they 
do so also to please their own eyes, to see attractive and 
beautiful things. The prejudice of the masses may debar 
men from any large use of furs as savoring of vulgar 
ostentation. But the workingman buys his wife or 
sweetheart the prettiest fur he can afford, and likes to 
feast his eyes upon it; and so long as he does that the 
taste for furs as ornament will not die out any more than 
the liking for beauty in woman or for gems as flowers 
made eternal. 
But the real basis of the charm of furs is, we believe, 
something more than warmth, or concentrated value, or 
beauty as ornament, or the ease with which they lend 
themselves to ostentation. It is the gratification of the 
innate love of luxury. For, like jewels, furs belong in 
the higest class of luxuries, those at once artistic and 
sumptuous. The mere feel of furs is a physical pleasure 
greater tlian that given by contact with the finest grade 
of velvet, while their tints and colors, the alternations of 
reflection and light, make them a never-ending delight to 
the eye. The very warmth they contribute to the body 
has an exhilaration that nothing else can give. Even 
when lying on a chair, or hanging from the wall, they 
have a softness and richness and sumptuousness that in- 
vite repose while stimulating perception and appreciation 
of luxurious living. The mere ownership of a dyed 
muskrat slcin gives its poor possessor the feeling of shar- 
ing the sumptuousness of the world with the rich and 
cultured. Doubtless few persons have ever analyzed these 
sensations, but they are real, nevertheless; and, indeed, 
the more the attraction of f urs js considered, the greater 
the wonder that love for them is not deeper than it is. 
A good deal of this charm depends, of course, on the 
excellence of manufacture. For there are comparatively 
few furs the beauty of which is not enhanced by the fur- 
rier's craft. Singularly enough, it is to China, not to the 
industrial West, that we look for the perfection of this 
art. Northwestern Manchuria and the western plateaus of 
the empire, are veritable reservoirs of furs, and Pekin 
is the great center of the fur trade of the Eastern w^orld. 
The cold climate of these remote regions seems specially 
suited to the development of fur, which attains there a 
peculiar fineness and thickness. Even the hair and wool 
grown on these high plateaus take on many of the quali- 
ties of fur. The Manchurian dogs, for example, develop 
a real under fur in winter, and are bred in great numbers 
for their coats. The Manchurian cat skins have a higher 
value than those of the Bavarian Alps, while lamb skins, 
after treatment by the Chinese furriers, are almost as 
beautiful and sumptuous as the rarer furs. 
Despite the great yield of furs throughout the empire, 
the export trade in them has, however, been very small, 
only the lighter and less valuable kinds finding their way 
abroad. The choicer and finer furs are reserved for the 
domestic market, which among a people fond of personal 
luxury and substituting sumptuousness of costume for 
other adornment, is very large. Inevitably with such a 
demand the processes of manufacture have undergone 
great development, and with their infinite painstaking and 
disregard of time, the Chinese furriers have, save in the 
dyeing of special skins, become past masters in their art. 
In fact, should the furriers of Pekiu and Moukdeer ever 
lelea-se their finished stocks for export, Europe and 
America will gain a new luxury comparable to that of 
Chinese silks and Japanese satsuma pottery. For these 
men, if they do not in their delicate processes improve 
upon nature, do produce dressed furs which in tint, lustre 
and richness are unrivalled in the Western world. 
Some years ago the London Spectator, in commenting 
on Li Hung Chang's furs, described several of the mas- 
terpieces of the Pekin furriers' art owned by that states- 
m.an, and exhibited in London. It appears that the great 
Viceroy derived a part of his vast revenue from a tribute 
of furs from Northern Manchuria; that he maintained in 
Pekin large warehouses filled with the rarer furs; and 
that his punishment for the substitution by his agents of 
inferior for good skins were so terrible that no choice 
furs were diverted from his stores. Possessed of this 
supply of rare skins, the Pekin furriers had, of course, 
ample resource for the exercise of their highest skill. 
And in a robe made to imitate a sable skin enlarged to 
the size of a beaver skin, they seem to have reached the 
perfection of their art. 
The task they set themselves was not only to repro- 
duce nature on a greatly magnified scale, but to improve 
upon nature by making the fur lie the same way, instead 
of following the bends of the body. To accomplish this, 
they cut small pieces from the best part of sable skins, 
on which the fur was of the same length, tint and thick- 
ness. These pieces were so minute that when sewed to- 
gether three or four of them made only a square inch 
of skin. _ And the patches were, in turn, so sewed as to 
give no indication of joining, and to impart to the front 
of the robe a uniform and unbroken appearance. The 
beauty and sumptuousness of a robe thus made can 
readily be imagined, even by those not keenly alive to the 
attraction of furs. But not content, the furriers added 
ornamentation as unique as it was admirable in effect. 
They inserted in the robe the skin of the fore paw and 
shoulder of the sable, which, when sewed down on the 
uniform fur, formed, owing to the difference in their lie 
and texture, an ornament like the "eye" seen in a pea- 
cock's tail. The robe thus presented the appearance of 
an enormous sable skin ornamented with peacock's eyes 
in sable damask; a creation which, it is safe to say, cast 
in the shade any personal luxury devised by the purveyoi's 
to Solomon. 
No doubt the Chinese furriers chose the sable not alone 
because of its color and richness, but because of the uni- 
formity of fur; though a second robe, rivaling in effect 
the first, was made of skins of the red fox, of the differ- 
ing shades of red amber, with eyes formed of the bright 
black foot of the animal. In the fur of the sable both 
long hairs and the under fur are exactly uniform in size 
and texture, so that the skin has- the appearance of even- 
ness imparted by manufacture as well as the usual quali- 
ties of a raw fur. Naturally this superiority augments 
its value, the demand for the choicer Russian sables being 
so great that a bunch of ten of them, unfinished, easily 
commands $2,500. The fur of the sea otter, an animal 
now nearly extinct, has much of the same qualities as the 
sable, is, if anything, more beautiful, and owing to its 
rarity, brings a much higher price. Another fur, now 
scarcer even than the sea otter, is that of the Antartic 
seal, the most lustrous and thickest of all the seal fur. 
As London is the center of the fur trade of Europe 
and America, it should be possible through the records of 
the great January and March sales of Sir Charles Lamp- 
son and the Hudson's Bay Company, to secure fairly ac- 
curate knowledge of the rate at which the rarer furs are 
decreasing. Through these sales are distributed the major 
part of the vast annual catch of furs on the Western 
continent, Siberia and Australia. How large this catch 
is may be judged from the statement that, a few years 
ago, in four days' sales, lasting six hours each day, more 
than three million fur skins were disposed of. While 
apparently the rise in price of the better class of furs at 
these sales in recent years has been due in part to the 
demands of fashion, yet in the main it may be attributed 
to diminished supply, caused by the extermination of the 
animals bearing them. According to the Spectator's esti- 
mate, based on the evidence of these sales, the seal, sea 
otter, silver and blue fox and beaver are the fur-bearing 
animals earliest destined to extinction. 
That this loss can be replaced is, of course, impossible, 
though the opening of China to outer trade would give to 
Europe and America a stock of the rarer furs w^hich 
might last for some time. Failing this, the prospect is 
that, in the apparent impossibility of producing a substi- 
tute for fine furs, or breeding the animals bearing them in 
numbers sufficient to keep up supply, mankind will have 
to fall back upon the lighter and poorer furs, and the 
hair and wool producing animals. Lamb skin, in the 
hands of skillful furriers, can be made almost as beautiful 
as the choicer furs; hare skin can be so manufactured 
as to resemble sealskin, and- of a good many of the 
smaller fur-bearing animals we are insured a fairly per- 
manent supply. Prices will increase, doubtless, but as 
concentrated property that will only augment the charm 
of furs, which, as a gratification at once of the admira- 
tion for ornament and the love of luxury, will no more 
die out than the liking for flowers and sunsets, No doubt 
time will modify a good many of our ideas, but it will not 
change the desire of men to see things beautiful in them- 
selves and especially to see their wives and daughters 
made attractive by the additional grace which rich cos- 
tume imparts. H. M. Robinson. 
The Amefican Dipper and Tfout. 
MoRGANTOWN, W, Va. — Editor Forest and Stream: S. 
E. Loud, of the Centennial Fish Hatchery, of Wyo- 
ming, says that the bird known as the American Dip- 
per, a description and illustration of which is given in 
Bulletin No. 55, "The Birds of Wyoming," by Profes- 
sor W. C. Knight, of the University of Wyoming, is 
one that is very destructive to young trout, trout fry 
or the eggs of trout; having seen one of these birds 
eat a half dozen small trout at one meal, diving under 
the water in the fish ponds and staying until it secures 
its prey. 
The bird is about the size of a robin, is a dark blue 
slate color, has a short tail and small wings. It is 
found along the mountains and small streams. He 
urges sportsmen to kill it on sight. 
Emerson Carney. 
Sporting Reminiscences, 
New York, Jan. 27.— Editor Forest and Stream: There 
is one superiority which no one will dispute with you: 
that is the superiority of age. And although that pre- 
eminence is not one of unalloyed advantage, it has the 
quality of enabling its possessor to remember more 
and further back than those who were born after him. 
Youth, after all, is a sort of disreputable appurtenance 
which every one gets over as fast as he can and is sure 
in the end to dispose of. 
Look at the condition of the unhappv young men 
of the present day, who try to call themselves sports- 
men. Sport! Clay pigeons. For the maAvkish modern 
sentiment of combined newspaper nonsense and pro- 
tection of animal hypocrisy will not even allow them 
the feeble sport of killing live pigeons with a gun and 
demands that they shall wring their necks mercifully 
without giving them even a chance for their lives. 
There is a certain exercise of skill, and that exercise 
of skill is precisely the pleasure of shooting which the 
silly people who have never enjoyed it attribute to love 
of slaughter and common brutality, and in so far there 
is sport in both these occupations, but the feeblest 
sort of sport it is. I remember when it was a common 
thing for me to go out in the glorious brown autumn 
when the air was becoming crisp and the leaves had 
turned to brown, and driving up Third avenue half way 
to the Harlem River, hitch my horse to the fence 
alongside the road, which was then a country dirt 
road, and going into the adjoining fields, kill a fair 
day's bag, say fifteen quail, two or three rabbits and 
a woodcock or two. And then I would get back into 
my buggy, and be home to a home dinner and good 
company at the usual hour. 
There was good woodcock and English sriipe shoot- 
ing in Central Park long after it was laid out, and Mr. 
Alfred W. Craven, for years park commissioner and 
a devoted sportsman, used to invite me frequently to 
shoot with him along its water courses and muddy 
branches before it got into its modern elegance and 
development. Then, again, we Avould drive out to Ja- 
maica, and shoot on the meadows or kill rail, as many 
as forty in a day, on One Mile Creek, just beyond the 
village. 
In Jersey was most glorious shooting almost at our 
doors. The Big and Little Pieces, the Troy Meadows 
and a dozen other spots which I knew well then, but 
of which the very names have escaped my memory 
now, gave us the grandest shooting without exception 
in the world at snipe and woodcock, the kings of game 
birds. On one August day four of us bagged sixty 
woodcock that had come out into the flooded open 
meadow, and on another occasion, during two weeks, 
four of us averaged seventy-five a day in the big 
swamps of Jersey, a little further away. The: farmfers, 
too, were glad to see us, and often went with us and 
allowed us to shoot on the first day of July a few 
days before the law was up, as they then legally had 
the right to do. Further back still, when I was a very 
little boy, I used to see men fishing on the bridge 
from the Battery to Castle Garden, good fishermen, 
too, with the finest of reels, rods and tackle, and catch- 
ing striped bass and weakfish in abundance of more 
than fair size. 
And w^hat a grand lot of sportsmen- they were, that 
old guard, who never killed a bird unfairly and who 
trained their dogs, till there was hardly a more beauti- 
ful sight than to see a couple of them on a point, and 
perhaps one or two more backing. Frank Forester, 
William Henry Herbert, not a first-rate shot and a 
disagreeable man with his rude English manners, but 
a splendid writer, who has never had an equal in 
sporting matters. General Dix, who used to shoot bay 
snipe in his old days with Colonel Post at a special 
hole in the pond in the meadow east of Quogue, which 
they had purchased for the purpose and where they 
built a cover which enabled them to read when the 
birds were not flying. And Colonel Post himself, of 
whom the old darkey guide who accompanied them 
used to say, "The Colonel am a werry destructive man, 
a werry destructive man in a flock of snipe." Judge 
John K. Hackett, the most perfect shot, whether with 
gun or pistol, who lived in my time. Haywood Gib- 
bons, who lived at Madison, where the famous racer 
Fashion was bred by his father, and who may be liv- 
ing still, for he went South during the Rebellion and 
I have not seen him since. Peter Vredenburgh, of 
Eatontowm, N. J., with whom I have killed a half 
bushel basket of fall woodcock in a few days' shooting, 
and who was himself killed while fighting for his coun- 
try in the Civil War. Charlie Banks, a splendid shot 
and good fellow who is still with us; Charles E. White- 
head, another like him; George Penniman, the man 
who discoA'^red Currituck by rowing on an exploring 
expedition the entire length of the sounds of the North 
Carolina coast till he reached that paradise of duck 
shooters, where he has killed in a single day and to 
his own gun, a hundred and fifty _of the best ducks that 
fly. Judge Gildersleeve, a young man to be in this 
category perhaps, who partly won his way to the 
bench through his preeminence with the rifle. William 
C. Barret, who, if he did get into financial trouble in 
his later days, was "a good fellow" all through,- and 
cast the fly beautifully. My intimate old friend, Charles 
Carow, the father of the lady of the White House, who 
cast the fly simply to perfection, and with whom I 
have fished many and many a day on the waters of old 
Long Island and elsewhere as well. Charles Hutchin- 
son, Mayor of Utica, a capital fly-fisherman. Cassius 
Darling, who accompanied me on many a trip into 
the forests of Canada to kill the glorious salmon. 
Judge Beebe, of Beebe, Dean & Donohue, the well- 
known lawj'ers, who, for a bet once dragged a light 
wagon from Vails, near Smithtown, to the railway 
station, five miles distant. Barret and he were there 
fishing, and when they were going home the wagon 
was brought out and left before the door, while there 
was some delay in hitching up the horse. Barret was 
uneasy, and said they would be late, when Beebe re- 
sponded, "I could drag that wagon myself there in 
time for the train." 
"I bet you $50 you could not," retorted Barret. 
