9 
into the hand of his keeper without instructing him as to what he 
might and what he might not kill with it. The British landowner 
was, as a rule, pleased to see a rare bird in his grounds ; if he 
possessed a heronry it was the crowning glory of his park ; and he 
tolerated the otter in his osier beds and the badger in his sand hills. 
The arch enemy of wild birds was the non-resident shooting tenant, 
and worse still, the syndicate—hateful word and hateful thing—of 
shooting tenants. The shooting tenant had hardly any bowels of 
compassion; the syndicate had none at all. They valued the land 
chiefly or wholly according to the number of head of game; and 
dividing the entire animal world into game and vermin, bade the 
gamekeeper, in the words of King Lear, “ kill, kill, kill.” 
Under sinister influences such as these in this country, many 
beautiful birds had already ceased to exist, or were fast disappearing. 
In other continents preserves for wild life were being established, such 
as Yellowstone Park in America, and, thanks chiefly to Mr. E. N. 
Buxton, the reserve established by our own Legislature in Somaliland. 
In England we had a preserve of a similar character in Wolmer Forest, 
and no tribute could be more acceptable as a memorial to Gilbert 
White than the setting apart of a portion of that country, which he 
must have trodden so frequently, as a sanctuary for the birds and 
animals he studied so sympathetically. But why should not every 
large estate'in the country, at any rate where the owner was resident 
—as was generally the case in England—be in itself a sanctuary for 
all wild liie? There was a balance in nature which man never 
violated but to his cost. “ Live, and let live,” was the principle 
demanded by sentiment no less than by common sense. Was there 
not room, not only for game, but also for the beautiful free creatures 
of wild nature? To his mind there was something to thrill the 
imagination in the graceful hovering of the kestrel, the wild swoop 
of the hawk, the soaring circles of the buzzard, the solemn hoot of 
the owl, the sepulchral croak of the raven, and the cheerful chatter 
of the magpie and the jackdaw. 
The resolution was adopted. 
Sir John Cockburn, dealing with the aims and methods of 
Nature Study, referred to the important Step taken last year by the 
holding of the Nature Study- Exhibition in London, with the organi¬ 
sation of which he was so closely associated. In that exhibition 
they discountenanced collections of eggs or plumage, and held to 
the view that children should not be encouraged to make their 
bediooms, or other places where they kept their treasures, into 
charnel-houses, but should furnish their memories with rich stores 
of observation of living things. Their desire was not so much to 
stimulate scientific study, which must necessarily be to some extent 
analytical, as to urge the study of nature as a living whole. With 
