B49 
through three months' of accumulated mail.- This had 
been piling up at the Tomck post-office, and required a 
sledge to haul it to the hotel. There were over a hun- 
dred, letters and about 300 j ournals, catalogues, etc. Most 
of the printed matter my time was too limited even to 
glance at. It must have proved a good waste-paper per- 
quisite for some one of the hotel help — for paper has a 
value in remote Asiatic regions unknown to the Ameri- 
can townsman. 
There is a well-known outing periodical published in 
Paris which has a unique feature, in that it publishes 
a list of professional sportsmen always on long-distance 
touring, the regions they are covering, and addresses for 
mail matter. The result is the enterprising French tourist 
supplies depots keep these parties supplied with their 
catalogues; and my name somehow having got into that 
list, I found myself well supplied with sporting goods 
catalogues and circulars. But all this is a mistake. The 
true sportsman needs to know not what to buy, but what 
to be able to do without. The secret is, to know how to 
be able to take too little and yet enough. Any fool can 
"take plenty." True woodcraftness consists in knowing 
how to be able to make use of the things around you, 
and not to lug around a 20-pound cooking stove when a 
hole in the ground and a few stripped boughs will do as 
a makeshift. L. Lodian. 
A Dmnef to Mr. Lee. 
While not an invited guest, yet I sincerely regret that 
the Morris-Brown-Kelly-Seaton Metropolitan Club din- 
ner has been abandoned. And this reminds me of a 
dinner that was not eaten (although prepared) and the 
guests all assembled, which took place over thirty, years 
ago in New York. 
Mr. Lee, a noted English clubman, and husband of the 
much lamented artiste, Adelaide Neilson, was on a a visit 
to New York. It was his first visit. In a spirit of mis- 
chief, Dan Bryant, the minstrel, conceived the idea of 
inviting Mr. Lee to dinner, there to meet some of the 
most prominent Americans of the day. And the invita- 
tion was sent to Mr. Lee, and until the day of the dinner 
he flattered himself that he was to meet such prominent 
men as William Cullen Bryant, Horatio (actually Nelse) 
Seymour, and a number of other minstrels carrying 
names, stage or otherwise, of some of our most cele- 
brated citizens. 
The evening arrived, and Mr. Lee, monocled and ex- 
pectant, was in turn gravely introduced to William Cullen 
Bryant, Honorable Horatio Seymour, and others of note, 
when dinner was announced and the guests filed in to 
their seats, Dan Bryant taking the seat of honor with 
Mr. Lee on his right. 
The practical joke was one that would no! stun'6 much 
drawing out. So the moment they were seated Da a Bryant 
raised his plate of Blue Points to his nose, and, giving 
a whew ! of disgust, passed it across the table and 
grabbed that of Nelse Seymou. Instantly Seymour, 
kicking his chair back, arose to his full length, drawing at 
the same time an immense old-fashioned Colt's revolver 
from his hip pocket. Dan Bryant retaliated by drawing 
an pld-time bowie knife from his waistband, and the rest 
taking the cue, turmoil resulted, and Mr. Lee made his 
way from the dining room with all speed, undoubtedly 
with s<" me queer ideas of American men and customs. 
So what might have happened at the ' Morris-Kelly- 
Brown -Seton banquet the writer does not pretend to 
foretell or imagine. - Charles Cristadoro. 
Save the American Bison. 
The "passing" of a great and noble animal is a 
calamity which every intelligent person should seek to 
avert. It is a loss to the world which can never be re- 
paired, since an animal once extinct has gone forever. 
At this time we are called upon to prevent a loss of this 
kind; I refer to the threatened extinction of the Ameri- 
can bison. I cannot think of- this magnificent creature 
which for untold thousands of years nature has gradually 
been molding until it is one of the grandest on the earth 
—I cannot watch its fast-approaching end without mak- 
ing another earnest appeal to the people of the United 
States to take their last chance to save it. 
The importance of an immediate and active movement 
to preserve the last remaining buffaloes is recognized, 
not only by the press, which is devoting all necessary 
■space to the subject, but by every natural history society, 
every institution of learning, every individual to whom 
I have written on the matter. 
President Roosevelt, in his annual message, says : 
"I desire again to urge upon Congress the importance 
of authorizing the President to set aside certain portions 
of the reserves or other public lands as game refuges for 
the preservation of the bison, the wapiti, and other large 
beasts once so abundant in our woods and mountains and 
on . our great plains, and now tending toward extinction." 
And a little further on he says: 
"We owe it to future generations to keep alive the 
noble and beautiful creatures which by their presence add 
such distinctive character to the American wilderness." 
And surely no other animal appeals 1 to the American 
people from so many points of view as this one does. 
An adult buffalo bull is a creature of imposing grandeur. 
If you are an American, no doubt you take some pride in 
the fact that one of the grandest animals of all time 
is a native of this country; I urge you to let your pride 
in this matter prompt you to do some act, however small, 
tending to save this animal for future generations of 
Americans. If you have no time to do more, will you 
not write me ever -so brief a note expressing approval of 
a definite plan to preserve the buffalo, and I will see that 
your views are brought to the attention of the Govern- 
ment. Your letter will be in good company, and will "be 
filed with letters from many of the leading men in the 
United States, including President Roosevelt himself. 
If you are a lover of animals, then you must be doubly 
interested in the fate of the bison — sufficiently interested, 
I feel sure, to raise a hand to help in a reasonable move- 
ment for his preservation. It is a good thing to be in 
favor of having desirable ends accomplished, but it is not 
quite enough. The desirable ends are never accomplished 
until somebody actually does something toward their ac- 
complishment, and where all are interested, all should 
help, at least a little. If you desire a thing, surely it 
should not be too much trouble to ask for it. 
If you are a naturalist, no argument is necessary; you 
know only too well that the passing of the bison would 
be an irreparable loss to the fauna of this country. Your 
assistance in this movement is most earnestly solicited, 
for it is to you and your brethren that the country looks 
for advice in matters of this kind. Perchance you are a 
member of some natural history society; if so can you 
not bring this matter before the members at some meet- 
ing in the near future, and if possible urge them to pass 
a set of resolutions setting forth the necessity of saving 
the bison, and expressing their sympathy with the 
present movement to save him. If you are a writer, do 
not fail to write some letters or articles in favor of the 
preservation of the buffalo, and if you need illustrations, 
come to me, and for this purpose I will give you what I 
can spare. If you lecture, you can help by giving, at the 
end, a five-minute talk in favor of the preservation of 
the bison, and if you need a few lantern slides, perhaps 
I can put you in the way of getting them. 
If you are interested in educational matters, take the 
first opportunity to see a fine specimen of a living buffalo, 
give him five minutes' thoughtful attention, and then ask 
yourself if he is worth saving. As you look upon his 
mighty frame, you will read intelligently long chapters 
from the early history of our country. Perhaps for the 
first time you will get the real flavor of the life of the 
Indian— a life inseparable from the life of the great crea- 
ture before you. This was the animal he hunted on his 
wild little pony ; this is the animal which supplied his 
every want. That grim, burly head was the mask he used 
in the "buffalo" dance; that splendid hide served him as 
a robe, as a blanket, as a covering for his tepee, and for 
a score of other purposes. That flesh, dried or cooked, 
served him for food; from those sinews he made strings 
for his bows and thread to sew his clothing. From the 
long hair on the fore part of the body he made ropes and 
halters and lariats ; in fact, there was no oart of the buf- 
falo for which the Indian did not find some very good 
use. Shall the teachers of the future and_ the children 
they teach, be deprived of this striking object-lesson in 
American history, or will you do your little share toward 
his permanent preservation? 
If you look at the matter from a purely utilitarian 
point of view, you will at least admit that for many 
purposes a buffalo skin has no equal. To-day a buffalo 
robe can scarcely be bought for money ; yet within a com- 
paratively few years this article might again be on the 
market at a reasonable price, if the buffaloes now living 
were taken up by the Government and maintained in 
suitable reservations. By the experiments carried on at 
Corbin Park and elsewhere, it has been proved that buf- 
faloes multiply rapidly under proper conditions, and that 
they are easy and inexpensive to rear. But. they should 
no longer be left in the hands of private individuals, who 
are liable at any time to sell the last survivors for their 
hides and heads. Ernest Harold Baynes. 
Some Bird Names. 
I.— The Song Birds. 
An entertaining side-study in ornithology is into the 
history of birds' names. It teaches us how the same 
little creatures in which we delight presented themselves 
to our forefathers or to other races; and it reveals many 
an accurate observation as well as many a queer old 
error, preserved by the single symbol of a name — some- 
times so disguised as to be unintelligible to modern ears. 
We say "we call a spade a spade." We can trace that 
word back in history and find that the early Englishmen, 
the Romans, perhaps the people who talked Sanscrit, all 
uttered a sound something like it when they meant the 
implement in question; but why that particular sound, 
rather than some other, should stand for spade, is left 
wholly to conjecture. It is not so in most cases with the 
names of animals, and hence there is the satisfaction, in 
this department of etymology, of arriving somewhere at 
last. No one who has heard the shrill scream of a shrike, 
for an instance, needs speculate over the origin of that 
name-word. 
The popular designations of the great majority of birds 
are either descriptive* (1) of their voice, (2) of their 
appearance (color), (3) of some striking habit, (4) of 
the favorite food, (5) of some customary haunt, or else 
they are words indicating a human sympathy or affection- 
ate regard, or some fanciful attribute, frequently of a 
mythological kind. I am speaking now of generic terms 
— names of classes of birds- — to which the specific appella- 
tions attach themselves as sub-titles embodying some in- 
dividually distinctive point. 
This may seem a very rudimentary and matter-of-course 
kind of ' information, which nobody is disposed to dis- 
pute about; but how circumstantially the law is sup- 
ported would scarcely be suspected by one who has not 
studied the matter and looked behind the disguises that 
the progress of changeful time and spelling have thrown 
over the original vocal expression in the case of most of 
our modern bird names. Take, for example, the word 
"crow." That does not seem onomatopoetic, nor is it in 
its present form; but we know it to be a change (by 
transposition of the "r" and "o," according to Grimm's 
law) from the Latin corvus (Sanskrit kara-va, Greek 
korap) ; and if you will take the trouble to pronounce 
that slowly, you will see at once that it contains the 
familiar, kaw of this bird, quite as well as does the kah- 
kah of the Iroquois tongue. 
Although this one is hardly an instance in point, it is 
a fact worthy of note that the outcome of this process has 
fortunately resulted in a series of words that are, upon 
the whole, singularly, euphonious, and thus add to the de- 
light with which we regard these most lovely and lovable 
♦The learned compilers of The New English Dictionary (Dr. 
Murray's) say that the word bird is English alone — no corre- 
sponding form appearing in any other Teutonic language, and 
that its etymology is unknown; the earlier spellings put the r 
before, instead of after, the vowel, and the primitive application 
seems to have been as a general name for the young of the feath- 
ered tribes. Skeat (Klym. Diet.) hints that bird is allied to 
"brood," and hence is- finely descriptive — the creature that broods; 
or, to go a little deeper into the analysis, both of word and fact, 
the creature that brings forth its young by means of warmth. 
of animals. The mere sound of such words as bobolink, 
blackbird, orchard oriole, petrel, killdee, whippoorwill, 
robin redbreast, meadowlark, goldfinch, longspur, che- 
wink, song-sparrow, vireo, summer warbler, brown 
thrasher, winter wren, tufted tit, wood-thrush, chickadee, 
bluebird, and others, is pleasing in itself, as well as de- 
lightfully suggestive of the green fields and murmur- 
ing woods and breezy waters where these gentle and 
beautiful little creatures disport themselves. They are all 
— or nearly all — good Saxon words, too, and positively 
enrich our language to the ear as well as in the written 
vocabulary. 
Let us glance over a catalogue of our North American 
birds and see what curiosities of this kind are hidden in 
their common names, which in most cases have been im- 
ported from the old world, though often with a different 
application. 
The word "thrush" is very old, appearing in substan- 
tially the same shape — the u sound having superseded an 
older y or 0 — in the Icelandic and early English speech. 
I believe that the original word had a reference to the 
throat, which swells and moves visibly when the bird is 
singing ; or, in other words, to the singing powers of this 
family, whose musical voice is probably its most notable 
trait. The thrushes are, par excellence, the singing birds 
of Europe and America. This view is strengthened when 
one recalls that the old German word drozzd, coming 
from the same root as our English word "throat," gives 
drossel in modern German as the word for "throat" or 
"throttle," and also for "thrush" (a disease of this organ 
is still known. as thrush). In England the finest songster 
of the family is the throstle or threstel (old spelling), 
and a similar bird of our own is the "thresher" or 
"thrasher" (H. rufus). In the dialect of the Germans of 
Pennsylvania this species is called the omshel, which is 
their rendering of the German amsel, the parent of an- 
other old English word for "thrush" preserved among us 
in the name of the water ouzel of the Pacific slope. 
"Bluebird" requires no further space than merely to 
mention that it is "blue robin" in Rhode Island, which 
is much nearer the European original than when that 
name (which means Little Robert) was given to our 
migratory thrush by the Massachusetts colonists, simply 
because he had a red breast. 
Next come the Paridse. "Tit" originally signified some- 
thing small ; we have it in such expressions as "tit-for- 
tat," and in the word tittle. A kind of pony used to be 
called a tit; and so did a kind of woman — small, but 
vicious. Among birds it appears in titling for sparrow 
(Iceland), in titlark and titmouse. Of the former we 
have one representative, and of the latter several; but 
though the titmouses are partly gray in plumage, the lat- 
ter half of the word has nothing to do with "mouse," the 
name of an animal, which is traced back to the Sanskrit 
root mus, "to steal." On the contrary, it comes from an 
ancient English name, mdse, which belonged to several 
kinds of diminutive birds, and refers to their small size. 
The plural, therefore, in spite of our dictionaries, should 
not be titmice, but titmouses. 
The local names of the . American titmouses call for 
only brief mention. "Tom-tit" is alliterative. The crested 
southern species is the "peto" or "peterbird" on account 
of its note ; a Texan variety has won the name "fat- 
eater" by its yellow-daubed head, while the Mexicans seek 
to imitate its voice in petachoche. No explanation is re- 
quired for chicadee, belonging to several species, after one 
has heard its 
"Saucy note 
Out of sound heart arid merry throat." 
The nuthatch is the nut-"hacker," and "ovenbird" re- 
fers to the domed nest of the Seiurus. "Wren" descends 
from an ancient wrin, whence, we are told, came many 
words in the old Teutonic languages, meaning to neigh 
(as a stallion), squeal (as a boar), or chirp (as a cock- 
sparrow)^ So far "wren" is an imitative word, and it is 
still used in the Scandinavian tongues to express a whine 
or squeal; but a further notion of masculinity was car- 
ried, so that the wren's name implies that, in the opinion 
of our ancestors, he had wanton manners—was a bold, 
bad little bird. This does not seem to me so much de- 
served by our American species, at least, as by our 
sparrows. 
"The Frenchmen in Louisiana," as I once wrote in the 
Nuttall Ornithological Club's Bulletin (viii., 1883, P- 77), 
"in the early days gave to their familiar wren (probably 
the great Carolina or mocking wren) the name 'roitelet/ 
or little king. This was a direct importation from 
Europe, and perpetuated a bit of folk-lore, which tells that 
