February 26, 1886) thousands of skins of the soft- 
feathered and easily-dyed grebes, rare in the East, come 
to you in vales from deserted nesting-grounds in the 
West? That, according to the editor of Forest and Stream 
(March 6, 1884), a bird man who handles 30,000 skins 
per annum killed and prepared for you 11,018 children 
of the air in three months of 1883 in eastern South 
Carolina ? Who cares whether these birds, or those of 
the 70,000 skins shipped to a New York dealer about the 
same time, were songsters or not ? Who cares whether 
they were shot in season or out of season, provided their 
bodies or feathers are “pretty?” What effect has 
been produced by the knowledge that Isaac McClellan, 
of Greenport, Long Island, in 1886, told Mr. William 
Dutcher ( Science , February 26, 1886) that our sisters’ 
agents, the hat decorators, had nearly exterminated the 
gulls in that region, slaughtering, besides, robins, orioles, 
blackbirds, meadow-larks, etc. ? And who regrets the 
thousand cedar birds which one gunner told Mr. Dutcher 
he shot for women’s hats in the winter of 1883 ? or the 
fact that the pleasure boatmen at Barnegat and Beach 
Haven, New Jersey, stopped boating to earn $50 
a week killing terns for women at 10 cents a piece, to- 
gether with crow blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, 
and snow-buntings, so as to make it possible for Mr. 
Dutcher to find 30,000 skins of these birds for sale in a 
New York hat store in i 883 ? 
But why care for the 40,000 terns (see J. A. Allen, 
in Science , February 26, 1886) slaughtered in a single 
recent season on Cape Cod? Who that is deaf to the 
egret’s story will listen to that of the robin, the meadow 
lark, the sparrow, the thrush, the warbler, the vireo, or 
the wax-wing? With the fate of the 20,000,000 to 30,- 
000,000 birds (W. H. Hudson, in London Times , Octo- 
ber 17, 1893) annually imported to Great Britain from 
across the seas “ feathered woman ” seems to have no con- 
cern. The unfortunate egret comes from India, and, if no 
more from Florida, from South America, from the far 
Orient, and from Australia. The birds of paradise, whose 
stuffed carcasses might curse their wearers, are nearly ex- 
terminated in Borneo. The parakeets are poisoned in 
New Guinea. From the ends of the earth, here a wing and 
there a tail, here a head and there a breast, incongruous 
nondescripts are patched together from a multitude of fair 
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