though the vultures should refrain and leave the whole 
South Californian swamp to putrify with the decaying 
flesh of snowy victims. 
When the hairdresser is done, while the carriage waits, 
before your last look in the mirror, read if you can 
another description byT. Gilbert Pearson (World’s Con- 
gress of Ornithology, Chicago, Charles H. Sergei Co., 
Chicago, 1896) of the starveling cries dedicated to you at 
an inland rookery near Waldo, Florida, where the flies 
buzzed over heaps of mangled and beautiful bodies, each 
with back stripped raw. Read how the plumes of one 
parent hidden under a tuft of grass had failed to find 
their roundabout way to the “ dinner dance.” “The 
ground was still wet with its blood. The earth had been 
beaten smooth with its wings. Its neck was arched. 
The plumes on its head were raised, and its bill was 
buried in the blood-clotted feathers of its breast.” 
Though it was dead, its young were alive. Too weak to 
rise they uttered the piteous cries, so often described, 
as they lifted their heads for the food, which because of 
the vanity of human mothers their dead mothers could 
never bring. 
“ There is nothing in the whole earth,” says Mr. W. 
H. Hudson (in the London Times for October 17, 1893) 
“so pitiable as this. So pitiable and shameful, that for 
such a purpose human cunning should take advantage 
of that feeling and instinct which we regard as so noble 
in our own species, and as something so sacred, the 
tender passion of a parent for its offspring, which causes 
it to neglect its own safety and perish miserably a sacri- 
fice to its love.” 
But who does not know that the sickening work is 
not confined to herons ? 
While ten years ago Mr. Scott was seeing these things 
in Florida, a New York woman (see Science , February 
26, 1886) hired men in one season to kill, at ten cents 
each about forty thousand gulls and terns, on the 
Cobb’s Island roost in the Chesapeake Bay. These 
were sold in Paris (where, according to Guizot, all 
civilizing ideas must first be tested by a superior intelli- 
gence before their application to Christendom) at forty 
cents each. Are you capable of teaching a child not to 
be cruel if you will not discard your “murderous mil- 
linery,” when you know that (as explained in Science , 
6 
