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FOREST AND STREAM 
August, 1919 
FORESTi^STREAM 
FORTY-EIGHTH YEAR 
FOUNDERS OF THE AUDUBON SOCIETY 
GOVERNING BOARD: 
GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, New York, N. Y. 
CARL E. AKELEY, American Museum of Natural History, New York. 
FRANK S. DAGGETT, Museum of Science, Los Angeles, Cal. 
EDMUND HELLER, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. 
C. HART MERRIAM, Biological Survey, Washington, D. C. 
WILFRED H, OSGOOD, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 111, 
JOHN M, PHILLIPS, Pennsylvania Game Commission, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
CHARLES SHELDON, Washington, D. C. 
GEORGE SHIRAS, 3rd, Washington, D. C. 
WILLIAM BRUETTE, Editor 
JOHN P. HOLMAN, Associate Editor 
TOM WOOD, Manager 
Nine East Fortieth Street, New York City 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL WILL BE TO 
stiidiously promote a healthful interest in outdoor rec- 
reation, and a refined taste for natural objects. 
August 14, 1873. 
ANOTHER BIRTHDAY 
ITH this number Forest and Stream enters 
upon its forty-eighth year. A review of the 
years that have passed since it was cradled in the 
arms of American Sportsmen would be a review of 
all that has been found worthwhile in American 
Sportsmanship. 
Among the many achievements which mark with 
distinction the years that have gone we like to re- 
member that it was Forest and Stream which or- 
ganized and financed the movement that saved Yel- 
lowstone Park ; that it founded the Audubon Society 
and made Glacier Park a playground for the people. 
Among its more recent works of public service 
might be mentioned the Mt. McKinley National Park 
in Alaska and the Migratory Bird Law; our Mr. 
Sheldon handling the McKinley Park movement and 
our Mr. Shiras, while a member of Congress, intro- 
duced the original Migratory Bird Law which be- 
came a reality in the Weeks-McLain Bill. 
The character of our Governing Board indicates 
the class of sportsmen to whom we appeal — men who 
carefully educate their sons along lines which they 
believe develop the highest qualities of manhood and 
good citizenship. We who hold the helm today feel 
it an honor to guide the destinies of Forest and 
Stream. Spurred on by the memory of its sponsors 
and sustained by the army of good friends who stand 
by, we aim to build from this, its forty-seventh birth- 
day, a paper worthy of the proud old name it bears. 
PUBLIC SEWERS 
C IVILIZATION has moved forward during the 
last four or five hundred years, but there is still 
a little room ahead of it. In the cheerful town of 
Hythe, in the fifteenth century, things were not 
quite so far advanced as in the United States in 
the twentieth century. For example, a jury of the 
townspeople of Hythe gave this account of street 
conditions as they then existed. 
When people cleaned out their stables and their 
hog yards they carried out the refuse and left it in 
the streets. When meat sellers butchered animals 
they took out the offal and threw it in the streets. 
Timber dealers left the trunks of trees lying across 
the street, while builders used the street for fram- 
ing the houses they were putting up, and so blocked 
the way. When the road ran along a river bank, 
the traders built their wharves and sheds on it. 
Butchers’ offal so fouled the wells that a pestilence 
swept Hythe, by which many lives were lost. At 
times, water poured out from houses flooded the 
street, or, again, some citizen turned a water course 
out of its bed, or built a dam across a stream and 
turned it into the road, without regard to what 
might happen to the public who used it. The dyers 
allowed their waste to run into the street, till it 
became a morass. It was difficult for the traveler to 
pass at all, and impossible for him to pass without 
being more or less covered by mud and filth. 
Near another town, a miller who needed a par- 
ticular kind of clay in order to repair his mill sent 
his servants to dig some from the nearby high road 
where there was a bed of this clay. The servants 
took what clay they needed, and no doubt the mill 
was duly repaired, but they left in the road a pit 
ten feet wide, eight feet deep and eight feet broad, 
which the rains soon filled with water. One night 
an innocent but unlucky traveling merchant came 
along the road and with his packhorse walked into 
this pit and was drowned. The miller was charged 
with the death and tried for it, but was acquitted 
on the ground that he had not intended to cause the 
merchant’s death, but only took what clay he needed 
to mend his mill. 
All this seems queer enough, but were these 
fifteenth century Englishmen so very different from 
ourselves? We think that we try to keep our streets 
reasonably clean and imagine that all citizens have 
certain rights which must be protected. Neverthe- 
less, few sights are more common in large towns 
than to see pedestrians, for whom the sidewalks are 
supposed to be reserved, obliged to turn out and 
trudge through the middle of the street to pass 
around carts, backed up over the sidewalk deliver- 
ing dry goods, coal, groceries, vegetables — goods of 
all sorts and descriptions — for the benefit of the 
trader and of the tenant of the land. Like their 
predecessors of Hythe, the builders today take the 
street or most of it. These, however, are small 
matters. 
What is important and what makes us seem cater- 
cousins to the old dwellers in Hythe and Notting- 
ham is the way in which we treat our streams — 
just as the fifteenth century English did their streets 
— converting them into sewers. Tovms and fac- 
tories empty their waste into the nearest stream, 
fouling the water and killing the fish. The rights 
of people living further down the stream are entirely 
ignored, unless as rarely happens, some man’s pa- 
tience becomes exhausted and he resorts to the 
courts, or interests some association in the matter. 
Up on Lake Champlain a dozen years ago a point 
where pulp mills had been turning their waste into 
a stream, polluting the water and killing the fish, 
these mills, through the activity of an organization 
of local summer residents, were forced to mend their 
ways and dispose of their waste in a less injurious 
fashion. Two or three years ago, pulp mills in 
Michigan, not far from Monroe, began to turn their 
waste into the river, destroyed great beds of wild 
celery that grew in Saginaw Bay and incidentally 
