EIGHTH THOUSAND (for gratuitous circulation.) 
gociet? for protection of 33ir6s.—'glo. 1. 
DESTRUCTION 
OF 
ORNAMENTAL-PLOMAGED BIRDS. 
T HE “ Keeper’s-Gibbet ” style of head-gear seems to go out of 
fashion in summer, only to return in winter with redoubled force. 
Meanwhile, in expectation of the coming demand, tens of thousands 
of beautiful and useful birds are massacred all over the world, for 
what Lord Lilford terms “ the disfigurement of women’s heads.” 
London, we are told by Mr. W. H. Hudson, one of our most accurate 
living naturalists, has become a mart for bird-skins and feathers for the 
whole of Europe. There are warehouses “ where it is possible for a 
person to walk ankle-deep—literally to wade—in bright-plumaged bird- 
skins, and see them piled shoulder-high on each side of him.” 
The same writer complains that so few women have raised their 
voices in appeal against this wholesale massacre. He might have stated 
that they not only fail to protest against it, but that some of them speak 
in public on religious, philanthropic, or aesthetic subjects, with their heads 
bedecked with stuffed birds, or oftenest of all with the slender spiral 
plume, obtainable only by the slaughter of egrets and the smaller herons 
during the breeding season, the nestlings being left to die of hunger. 
Englishwomen, mothers with nurseries at home, wear this decoration 
even when engaged in the public worship of the Creator of the beautiful 
and useful life of which they are inciting the continued destruction. 
This is beyond doubt a woman’s question. It is our vanity that 
stimulates the greed of commerce and our money that tempts bird 
slaughterers to continue their cruel work at home and abroad, in opposition 
to the Protective Acts, which in the interests of agriculture have been 
passed for the Protection of Wild Birds. 
Birds ought to be protected, not only for the delight they afford to 
eyes that can see, by their beauty of form, colour and motion ; and to 
ears that can hear, by their sweet glad song ; but because, as Dr. Talmage, 
of Brooklyn, asserts, there is only one weapon that has ever been formed 
powerful enough to wage successful war on whole species of destructive 
animalculse, and that is—a bird’s beak. “We are baring the orchards and 
gardens, and the harvest fields of America and England, to an exposure 
that is awful beyond calculation. So the ornithologists tell us, so the 
Agricultural Department of Washington tells us, so legislative committees 
tell us, and so our own common sense tells us. The laws on this subject 
are insufficient. Those we have already upon our books are not executed. 
What is most needed and what will be most effective will be the establish- 
