Forest and Stream. 
A Weekly Journal of the Rod and Gun. 
Copyright, J903 by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
''^"'^^'^iJ'M'^KWs'.g:"^'^"^"} NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 2, 1903. \ No. 846 Broadway, 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 
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garded. While it is intended to give wide latitude in discussion 
of current topics, the editors are not responsible for the views of 
correspondents. 
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Cbe forest ana Stream's Platform PlatiK, 
"TAe sale of game should be prohibited at all seasons." 
NAILS DRIVEN IN 1903.— No. Ili 
ARKANSAS. 
Laws 1903.— Act No. 117.— Sec. l.—That hereafter it shall be 
unlawful for any person, corporation or company to purchase or 
have in possession for barter, exchange or sale, or to expose for 
barter, exchange or sale, or to sell any buck doe, fawn or any 
part thereof or any wild turkey, or pinnated grouse, commonly 
called prairie chicken, or any quail, sometimes called Virginia 
partridge, or any other kind of game, wild fowls or birds, what- 
soever within this State, except bear, rabbits and squirrels. 
Sec. 2.— Thit it shall be unlawful for any railroad company, 
express company, steamboat company, or other company, or any 
private person to export, ship, remove or carry from this State any 
game of any kind whatsoever. 
THE CALAVERAS SEQUOIAS. 
It is reported that the threatened destruction of the 
Calaveras growth of giant sequoias is imminent. The 
Duluth lumberman who paid $100,000 for the forested 
tract on which the trees stand is building a railroad pre- 
paratory to realizing upon his investment by felling the 
sequoias and converting them into shingles and sidings. 
Being human, the Duluth man is doing only what would 
be done by anyone else who had such an amount of capi- 
tal locked up in giant trees and could not afford to let 
it remain idle. With him, as with any other practical 
lumberman, the exploitation of the California trees is a 
business proposition pure and simple. Sentiment is well 
enough in its way, but when sentiment and financial in- 
terests clash, the money considerations prevail. 
And yet there is another side to the matter— the senti- 
mental side, if one pleases — which is the actually im- 
portant one, and so transcendent that it should prevail to 
avert the lumbering of the Calaveras grove. The destruc- 
tion of these majestic sequoias would be a crime against 
nature, a crime against the human race. Their destruc- 
tion would mean the robbing of this generation and all 
succeeding generations for the benefit of an individual. It 
would mean the demolition in a year or a day of marvels 
of the vegetable world which have been thousands of 
years in the making. It would mean a conversion to pri- 
vate gain of something which belongs to the people, to 
mankind, and which in the very nature of things cannot 
of right belong to an individual. 
The big trees of California are unique. There is noth- 
ing else like them in the world. Their towering trunks 
are the slow development of centuries upon centuries, 
counting thousands of years. They are believed to be 
the oldest living things on the globe to-day. Their pre- 
cise age is a subject of scientific speculation, but all are 
agreed that it covers thousands of years; President Jor- 
dan is quoted as assigning to them an antiquity of 7,000 
years. They reach back to a period beyond that remote 
past when time was reckoned by the years of the reigns 
of the Pharaohs. Compared with the life of man, the 
passing of the generations of men, and the succession of 
races and of peoples, they are as the everlasting hills. 
And yet a thousand fold more marvelous than the hills, 
for the hills are of inert mass whose contours have been 
formed by the convulsions of nature, the raging of fires, 
the flux and convolutions of molten matter, and erosions 
by water and wind; they are products of the hazard and 
chance of the ages. The sequoia, on the contrary, is the 
development of life, beginning as the minute seed sending 
its fibres down into the ground and taking precarious 
hold upon the earth — a frail and tiny plant which the foot 
of a wild animal might crush, the summer shower sweep 
away, or the frosts of winter uproot — and expanding 
slowly and deliberately, but ever in accordance with well 
defined laws of vegetable growth, into the imposing and 
stupendous moniunents we marvel at to-day. If among 
natural objects there be any which compel veneration, 
certainly the giant sequoias must be counted among them. 
As to such objects there can be in equity no such prin- 
ciple as ownership by individual man. They are heritages 
of the race ; they belong not to one age, but to successive 
ages, for all time. They may not in equity be alienated. 
A government which in its scheme of land partition and 
appropriation to individual ownership fails to reserve 
such heirlooms from coming into private control is 
recreant to its trust. The United States should never 
have parted with its title to the California wonder trees. 
This having been done, the duty of the hour is to repair 
the error and to reclaim, rescue and restore to their right- 
ful ownership the sequoia grove. Congress should pro- 
vide at the next session for the purchase of the Calaveras 
trees, and give them place with the Palisades of the Hud- 
son, the Falls of Niagara, the Yellowstone and the 
Yosemite as public possessions jealously to be protected 
and preserved for all time. 
IN THE SPRINGTIME. 
The fields and woods and swamps, which so long lay 
gray and silent under the cold skies of winter, have at 
last taken on the brilliant hues of spring and are joyous 
with sounds of life. Green grass has pushed its way up 
through the brown mat of last year's herbage, and this 
green is varied with blotches of white where the pale 
bluettes are clustered close, and with half hidden flecks 
of purple where modest violets barely push their heads 
into sight. Thick along the stone walls and fences stand 
lines of ancient cherry trees, masses of white bloom, 
whose petals are already beginning to fall to earth; the 
peach orchards are glorious in their dress of pink, and 
even the apple trees are showing blossoms, pink now but 
a little later to be white and sweet smelling. Tiny leaves, 
white and purple and pale green, are thrusting forth from 
the tips of every twig on tree and shrub ; soon the woods 
will be verdant. 
Already robins and phoebes have built their nests, 
and the mothers are brooding their precious eggs. Black- 
birds, beautiful arid glossy, quaint in song and grotesque 
in action, are seen in the trees overhanging the water, or 
stalk over the smooth shaven grass near the house, dig- 
ging actively for grub and beetle, which a little later, if 
undisturbed, would eat the grass roots and cause the 
householder to fume and fret at the unsightly appearance 
of his carefully tended lawn. How brilliant are the colors 
of the red-shouldered male, or his cousin of bronzy hue 
and boat-shaped tail, or even of the vagabond cowbird, in 
their fresh spring dress. It will be but a few weeks 
before the tips of the feathers are worn off, and the hues 
of these beautiful birds are less brilliant. 
The crows have mated, and while some perhaps have 
already built their nests, others in small groups spend 
much of their time flying over the woods, calling loudly 
and performing various graceful evolutions. During the 
day, and even at night, from wood and swamp comes 
the mufHed roar of the partridge's drum, and already 
from fence rail and stone wall is heard the mellow "bob- 
white" of our friend the quail, a sound more familiar in 
June than in late April. 
Already the warblers are here. How many in number 
or in species we cannot tell, but their graceful forms are 
seen flitting through the swamps and about the snowy 
blossoms of the shadblow and the taller huckleberries, or 
sometimes, as in the case of the black and white creeper, 
starting at the top of a tall shrub and working their way 
downward to the ground, thence to fly to the top of an- 
other bush. The yellowrump, the redpoll, the black- 
throated blue and the black and white creeper are already 
plenty, and from now on other species will come in greater 
and greater numbers until a little before the middle of 
May the migration is at its height and trees and shrubs 
are crowded with these fluttering fairy forms. 
The little leverets, discovered two or three weeks ago 
by one of the boys in their form down on the edge of the 
swamp, have already opened their eyes on a new and 
lovely world, and now, when taken from their nest to be 
exhibited to the admiring small children, are likely to 
scramble off the hand and slip away into the ground pine, 
Avhere they vainly strive to hide. But when put back into 
their warm nest and covered over with the fur and moss 
and dead grass which their mother gathered for its roof, 
they remain quiet, waiting for her return.- Before long 
they will desert the nest arid will take to wandering in the 
swamp, where it may be feared too many of them will 
fall a prey to prowling fox or light-winged owl. 
In an old woodpecker's hole in a rotten stump not far 
away the flying squirrel has her little brood, and if one 
raps sharply on the stub she pops her head out of the hole 
and perhaps runs up the tree a foot or two to another 
hole into which she darts, stopping as soon as her body 
is within, and leaving her soft flat tail hanging out in 
plain view. 
The swamp is pleasant for the life it contains. Here 
the black-capped titmouse, the gray squirrel, the chip- 
munk and the downy woodpecker, all have their homes 
and may be watched from day to day and from hour to 
hour, as they go about their various tasks. 
From the office window of a tall building one may look 
down on tiled roofs and smoking chimneys and streets 
full of hard working people, and remembering the joys 
of field and swamp and woodland, may wish that it were 
his lot, in this lovely spring time, to be one of these out- 
door people, even if it were only to stride in the furrow 
behind the plow or to drop corn or potatoes. 
VANISHING WILD FLOWERS. 
The coming of spring and of the spring flowers 
prompts another reference to the Society for the Pro- 
tection of Native Plants. This New England society 
has been formed to arouse interest in the preservation 
of certain species of wild flowers which are in danger 
of extinction in some localities. Among such plants 
are. the Mayflower, two of the gentians and some of 
the orchids. The peril of the wild plants, as in the 
case of the wild game, is found in the demand of the 
market and the destruction to meet that demand. The 
gathering of country wild flowers for sale in citites is 
the agency which threatens their extermination. The 
secretary of the society, Miss Mary E. Carter, of the 
Boston Society of Natural History, Berkley Street, 
Boston, will gladly furnish such information as may 
aid in the establishment of similar plant protective so- 
cieties elsewhere. As is well know, there are several 
such associations in Great Britain and on the conti- 
nent. There is one in Ireland to protect the Killarney 
fern, and another in Switzerland whose care is the 
edelweiss. 
In some localities the taking of rare plants is pro- 
hibited by law. There is a famous scarlet orchid of the 
Cape of Good Hope, the Disa grandiAora, or flower of 
the gods, which is found only on Table Mountain, near 
Cape Town; and so persistent has been the industry of 
the orchid hunters, in collecting it for export to 
Europe, that the very existence of the unique species 
is threatened; and the authorities have prohibited, un- 
der severe penalties, the taking of flower or plant. 
Thus in all parts of the world intelligent public opinion 
is waking to a realization that the beautiful things of 
nature's garden must not be ruthlessly blotted out; 
that these things of exquisite beauty, which are in 
form and color the wondrous product of the slow evolu- 
tion of the ages, must not be annihilated in a moment 
by the thoughtlessness of man. 
Mr. Charles A. Shriner pokes fun at the New Jersey 
Legislature because it has created in the "sharp-skinned" 
hawk of the game law a new species. The Trenton legis- 
lators are by no means the first to try their hands at 
introducing new species into the world. In many States 
"ruffled grouse" owe their origin to such fiats, and in 
New York there long flourished the famous "gallimule," 
which was not a quadruped but a feathered biped which 
the Legislature created and kept alive for a nuniber of 
years. ^ 
The Governor of Massachusetts has signed the bill 
making permanent prohibition of the sale of woodcock 
and of ruffed grouse. The Governor of New York has 
signed the Armstrong bill forbidding the sale of wood- 
cock and grouse killed in the State. Arkansas has a new 
law forbidding the sale of any game whatever except bear, 
rabbit and squirrel. These three news items from widely 
separated States show the growth of the anti-sale system 
which in time will be of universil "—'■".ion. 
There is nothing like having a pull, as the robin said, 
when it yanked a worttl Out of the lawu. 
