las 
. OREST AND STREAM. 
|Aug. 1^, tgo$. 
dencc that I was in the Mississippi bottoms, and now 
the Spanish moss showed that I was coming into the 
Louisiana swamp country, pictures of which in school 
books show- alligators, Spanish- moss and dense shades. 
Moreover, I was meeting spring half way. Behind 
me. 2,000 miles, away the snow w-as melting, and darkies, 
whose tents the wind had blowm down at Salem, said 
the annual head rise was, coming. At Sterling, I had 
seen a peach tree in beautiful pink bloom, and green 
grass among the gray shreds on the levee face. Here 
the cypress tree was turning a soft maple red. .Follow- 
ing the cold night, ducks were coming north with the 
rise of the temperature. On all sides spring voices be- 
gan to predominate. One other river sign was as 
characteristic as any in the air. The Medicine Man 
looked at the latticed stern of the boat, and viewed 
the damp deck wdth undisguised fear. 
■‘That won't neveh do!’’ said he, “the yellow fever 
season is coming — that thing must come down!” 
With ax and hammer, we cut away the close lath 
lattice work and knocked the roof off the stern deck, 
letting the sun in upon the boards and wash bench, 
which had not been dry in months. The sun and wind 
worked together upon the stern deck, and widening 
dry spots appeared. With a shovel, debris under the 
boxes and fire-wood, was cast into the river and a re- 
markable change was wrought in the appearance of that 
part of the craft. 
A thorough job done in the stern, the galley looked 
unkempt, and was subjected to as thorough a putting 
to rights. The fore-cabin was in turn fretted into full 
companionship with the stern deck and the galley. 
Under the bow deck were bushels of bottles and junk 
—this stuff was hauled out and at the end of a week’s 
intermittent labor, the craft had gone through its spring 
house cleaning — here was ,a similarity between river 
and ban.K- )fie. 
Medicine Man wanted to go into Vicksburg with 
whai hr called “a good time” in his pocket. We went 
down from landing to landing, he “rubbing” the bank, 
and I skirmishing around picking up odds and ends 
of information about the region. At one landing, I 
was lying on the levee waiting the Medicine Man’s re- 
turn from back on a plantation, when I saw a youth on 
horseback galloping down the road. He stopped at 
the house in which my partner was trying to make a 
sale. A few moments later a man came -out of the 
house, jumped astride the horse and rode away back 
up the road. After a time I went back to the boat 
and several hours later, as we were dropping down in 
mid-stream, he told me that the boy had come after 
the constable to arrest a youth who was lying beside 
the road in some bushes to kill a school girl who had 
refused to marry him on demand. All the participants 
were negroes. 
Our landings were scanned with such vigilance by the 
Medicine Man that I made inciuiries which elicited the 
information that Mississippi was “mean.” Peddlers are 
obliged to take out license and pay high for them in 
that State. To sell medicine, one must pay $50, the 
Medicine Man said with vicious expletives against so 
narrow a State as that. When he landed in Mississippi, 
he looked in all directions, “shunning the white man.” 
When doing business, he went back from the river, and 
worked toward it, so that no plots laid behind him ' 
would cut him off from the river and the cabin boat.J 
Louisiana was better nafured toward the dealers in.; 
alleged , cures, but the laws were stringent, and it was j 
needful, to “offend” nobody, and also not to remain at i 
a landing long after sales were made behind the levee. ' 
“Louisiana has a farm,” the Medicine Man said. ; 
“They send such men as me to hit — what do ye think of i 
that? Seems like they was drawing the lines that close ; 
a poor man can’t make a living no more, less he goes ■ 
out and digs ditches, or shovels dirt — ^that ain’t no work ; 
for a white man. Why I seen white men to work and ,j 
niggers sitting down looking on! AinT _ that pretty j 
near the limit!” ’ j 
At Henderson’s Landing — a big store-house — the ; 
view from the levee top was such a one as a combina- 'i 
ation of many stories of the plantation South made one i 
believe it was a dream-like reality. The things which i 
one reads in Uncle Remus, Cable, Huck Finn and j 
Monette seemed to be right there before the eyes. ;| 
Along the inside of the levee was a road, dry, hard and j 
smooth. A little negro girl was walking down the road, f 
singing as if her heart was broken, but perfectly proud i 
of her bright blue dress, flat, wide black hat and shiny ; 
shoes. A new split rail fence — built in posts — around i 
an oasis of garden and white-washed “quarters” was be- ■ 
yond a five-strand wire fence, and for miles back, other i 
oases were in the desert Of plowed ground. On the ’ 
far horizon were deadenings — gaunt, girdled trees with ; 
smoke rising, indicating the burning process of clearing 
lands toward the swamp a few miles back. i 
[continued on page 135.] ■ 
A Captive Dolphin at the Aquarium 
Last week the New York Aquarium obtained its first 
dolphin, which was also so far as known the second ever 
held in captivity in this country. The old New York 
Aquarium had one for a few days, and many years ago 
the Brighton (England) Aquarium had one, but this 
seems to complete the record of the dolphin in captivity. 
This specimen was captured in a pound net off Long 
Branch on the New Jersey coast and was brought to 
Fulton IMarket. On Aug. 4 it was out of the water all 
day long and perhaps then received some injury. At all 
events, when seen on Monday last, the 7th, it did not 
seem to be in good condition. Although it made a great 
show in the pool swimming steadily and rising at_ short 
intervals to blow, it nevertheless seemed weak, did not 
swim level, and on one or two occasions ran against an 
obstruction at the edge of the pool. It died Aug. 7, about 
I o’clock. The specimen in question was seven feet long 
and was probably a common dolphin (Dclphinus delphis). 
Its form is slender, it has a gradually sloping forehead 
and long beak-like jaws which are armed with teeth- 
This is the common dolphin of the ancients, abundant, 
among other places, in the Mediterranean. By the an- 
cients, of course, it was regarded as a fish; but they were 
impressed by its intelligence which is far greater than 
that of any fish. It must not be confounded -with the 
fish Corypheena, which changes its colors in dying, and 
about which there were so many legends. This dolphin 
may roughly be described as black above and white below. 
The specimen in question seems to have the white run- 
ning forward on to the upper jaw. 
The dolphin is a swift swimmer, and was often used 
in heraldry, a dolphin, for example, forming the arms of 
the eldest son of the King of France, whence he was said 
to be called Dauphin, but as a matter of fact the Dauphin 
was so-called from the Province of Dauphine, the arms 
of this Province being the dolphin, and adopted by the 
King’s son. 
' About the dolphin cluster a multitude of legends, all 
pointing to great intelligence of the animal and to_its_ use- 
fulness to man. Of these legends, many may be dismissed 
as wholly mythic, but a modern tale, from a no less au- 
thoritative source than the Proceedings of the Zoological 
Society, is hardly less wonderful than some of those 
.stories of the ancients. Thus, Mr. Fairholm, in the Pro- 
ceedings of the Zoological Society for 1856, says : “In 
Moreton Bay the natives used, to aid the men in the cap- 
ture of ‘mullet,’ a kind of ‘porpoise.’ 'When a shoal of 
the fish comes into the bay, the natives with their spears 
make a peculiar splashing in the water. 'Whether the 
porpoises really understand this as a signal or think it is 
the fish it is difficult to determine, but the result is al- 
ways the same. They at once come in toward, driving 
the ‘mullet’ before them.” The person who told this 
■Story believed that the porpoises did understand the 
signal. 
It is hardly necessary to say to any reader of Forest 
AND Stream that the dolphin is not a fish, any more than 
is any other whale. All these cetaceans are mammals 
adapted for life in the ocean. They are an ancient group, 
running back to very early tertiary times. They are fish- 
like in form but wdth the exception that the tail — known 
as the flukes — is carried at right an^es to the plane of 
the body or horizontally, a fish’s tail being always car- 
ried vertically. Although the accounts of their size are 
constantly exaggerated, whales are the largest of mam- 
mals ; the great Sibbald’s rorqual being sometimes eighty 
or eighty-five feet in length, while one of the least in size 
of this group is only four feet long, and some have been 
reported even smaller. 
The whales are provided with two “fins,” analagous 
to the pectoral fins of fishes, and which represent the 
fore limbs of other mammals. The hind limbs have 
totally disappeared from the outside of the body, but in 
a number of species small bones are found lying in the 
flesh in advance of the tail, which, while they have no 
particular resemblance to any bones of the hind limbs, 
are yet believed to represent the pelvis and the femur. 
While almost all the whales are smooth skinned, never- 
theless a few species have a few hairs on them, and the 
dolphin at the Aquarium was one of these, for it still 
preserves on either side of the face half a dozen hairs, 
called a mustache. There is evidence that in very an- 
cient times the whales wore hair, just as to-day the seals 
have hair; on the other hand, the walrus, which belongs 
to the seal family, has little or no hair, and w'hen we get 
down to the group Sirenia, which includes the manatee, 
the dugong and the long extinct rhytina, which Bering’s 
sailors exterminated for food when they were wintering- 
in northeastern Siberia, we find species inhabiting the 
water which have little or no hair. This, however, has 
probably nothing to do with their water life, for there 
are a number of land mammals, all of them ungulates, 
which are almost naked. 
On the other hand, there is some evidence to show that 
at one time the whales — of course long anterior to the 
human period — were covered with bony scutes or scales. 
In fact, in some of the modern porpoises — and especially 
in the embryos of these porpoises — are found little tuber- 
cles, or bony nodules in the flesh which indicate that once, 
long ago, some of these whale-like animals had a cover- 
ing of armor, not unlike that possessed to-day by the 
armadillos. 
There are a great many more curious things to be said 
about the whales, for which the unfortunate dolphin down 
at the Aquarium might furnish the text. As one stood 
looking over into the pool and watching his periodical 
risings to the surface of the water for breath, it was in- 
teresting to observe the use of the blow hole or spiracle. 
The operation of blowing by the whale has been much 
misunderstood in the past, though it is to be presumed 
that all the readers of Forest and Stream understand 
that it is merely the act of expelling the air from the 
lungs. On the other hand, some hundreds of years ago 
it used to be said that the whale drew in the sea at his 
“gills” and spouted it through his “trunk,” while that 
fine old historian, who perhaps first figured the giant 
cuttlefish now so well known, intimated that the whale 
defended itself by spouting, sending up so great a volume 
of water that it might crush the attacking boat. He says 
that the whale “raises itself above the masts of the ships 
and beloJies forth draughts of ocean from its blow hole 
in such a way that it overwhelms with a rainy cloud even 
the strongest ship or exposes the sailors to greatest 
danger.” As a matter of fact, the damp air expelled from 
the lungs into the cooler air above the sea undergoes a 
certain condensation and steam is seen. The whale does 
not really discharge any water from his blow hole. If he 
begins to expel the air just before he reaches the sur- 
face there may be a few bubbles which will throw up a 
little fountain of water, but it is the animal’s breath 
which makes what looks like a jet of steam which hangs 
a little while in the air and then drifts off with the wind. 
As Mr. Moseby says in his “Notes of a Naturalist on the 
Challenger,” “The expiratory sound is very loud when 
heard close by, and is a sort of deep bass snort, extremely 
loud and somewhat prolonged ; it might even be compared 
to the sound produced by the rushing of steam at high 
pressure from a large pipe.” 
In ancient times the whale had few enemies, but within 
the past hundred and fifty years these have become so 
numerous as to pretty well exterminate the whales over 
much of the ocean. Bomb guns and other engines of de- 
struction are employed, and when it is once sighted the 
whale has a very small chance to escape. 
The Geese of Eufope and Asia* 
A VOLUME of very great interest has just been written 
by Sergius Alpheraky, a Russian ornithologist, and pub 
lished in English by Rowland 'Ward, of London. The 
work is highly spoken of by some of the British jour- 
nals. The twenty-four plates are in colors, and the 
text interesting and valuable. The net price in London 
is about $i6. 
Is Nature Partial to Man ? ] 
Editor Forest and Stream: i 
SO' much is said about nature being partial to man in I 
comparison with the other animals — inasmuch as she has^ 
endowed him with high mental faculties, while to the; 
others ''only instinct is given — that it may be a trifle inter- 
esting to look into the matter to discover .if possible’ 
whether those assertions are true. 
Now, whether the advantages that humanity has in the 
one direction any more than compensate for those pos- ^ 
sessed by the rest of the animal world in other ways, is : 
a profound que,stion. To me it seems that the Good Dame'^ 
manages her affairs in such a way as to be impartial to 1 
every link in the great chain of animate beings, from the ] 
highest form to the lowest; but if there is a slight par- j 
tiality shown to^ either it sometimes looks to be in favor \ 
of the other orders rather than humanity'. j 
Of course it is known that nature provides the animal i 
world with the materials for food, covering and shelter. \ 
By most of the wild animals the food, seemingly, is 
easily and abundantly obtained. One cannot believe, they ; 
generally go very hungry or half-starved by the thousand, I 
or very often wholly so, as is the case with humans in j 
the big cities and in many other places; and in regard to ; 
covering, to the mammals and to birds, the thickness of 
•the coat or the dress is adjusted in relation to the sea- i 
sons without any extra effort on their part, and in mostl 
cases their shelter is found or made by them instinctively '! 
and with but a little if any worriment about the matter; .* 
while man has to hustle from the word go to get the 
three essentials that nature gives out and out to the other ' 
orders. 
Man’s brain has to wmrk continually faster than any 
steam sawmill to concoct ways for getting enough food, • 
clothing and shelter for himself and his dependents, and 
even with all that thought the three essentials will often | 
be most decidedly inadequate. . 
Suppose one makes other comparisons between the ad- 
vantages that mankind has and the ones the other ani- ‘ 
mals have. Take it in the line of shelter, even the bear j 
or his plantigrade relative the raccoon— clothed in a nice | 
warm coat of fur provided for it, as one - might say, | 
gratuitously (fur that humans would give a big pile to ! 
get hold of)— can have a first-class -domicile in a hollow ’ 
tree, or else in a cave, with no fear of .a magistrate poking J 
around and trying to serve a write of ejectment for non- ■ 
payment of rent, or else trying to foreclose a mortgage i 
on the premises. True, occasionally some hunter may i 
succeed m getting a chance to kill bruin or the coon, but I 
that is a side issue, a sort of a digression,- as it were. i 
A little more as to dress. Now the feathered tribes < 
will beat the human family ten to one in the gorgeous- ^ 
ness of their dresses. Even “Solomon in all his glory” 1 
couldn’t hold a candle to many of our birds. Why, the I 
most richly-.gowmed Fifth avenue belle, or other 'gor- i 
geously attired feminine in all her wealth of toggery can- i 
not begin to make as charming a showing as our dear i 
little scarlet tanager, Baltimore oriole or bluejay or even ^ 
the average butterfly, to say nothing of the hundreds of i 
.species of still more beautifully plumed tropical birds and 1 
bright colored insects. 
tionally far behind nearly all the other animals "Some- 
where _ among my reading matter I recollect seeing th( 
following: Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider hei 
ways and be wise. Now, while one is in the considerine 
business about ants, let him observe what a big load om 
of those tiny insects will totp away on its back' If a 
human being had as much lifting and carrying power ir 
i-. -p n to his size as an ant has, when moving time 
came around he not only could carry all of his furniture 
and other (personal effects away at one backload but he 
could take the house along, too. 
Now as to the toughness of other animals in compari- 
son with itian. _ Not long since, while strolling through 
the woods here , in Jersey, I saw a couple of gray squirrel' 
liiaying among the branches of a large oak tree forty feel 
