VALUE OF BI11DS. 
97 
ellers, as common on the Isthmus of Suez down to the middle 
of the seventeenth century. It appears to have frequented 
Syria and even Asia Minor at earlier periods, hut is now found 
only in the seclusion of remoter deserts. 
The modern increased facilities of transportation have 
brought distant markets within reach of the professional hunt¬ 
er, and thereby given a new impulse to his destructive pro¬ 
pensities. Hot only do all Great Britain and Ireland contrib¬ 
ute to the supply of game for the British capital, but the 
canvas-back duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen 
from the basin of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls 
of the London poulterer. Kohl * informs us that on the coasts 
of the North Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually 
taken in the course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to 
the large maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great 
European cities show a prodigious consumption of game birds, 
but the official returns fall far below the truth, because they 
do not include the rural districts, and because neither the 
poacher nor his customers report the number of his victims. 
Reproduction, in cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with 
this excessive destruction, and there is no doubt that all the 
wild birds which are chased for their flesh or their plumage 
are diminishing with a rapidity which justifies the fear that 
the last of them will soon follow the dodo and the wingless 
auk. 
Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their 
flesh or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used 
as food, are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them 
by nature, not otherwise specially useful to man, and, there¬ 
fore, their wholesale destruction is an economical evil only in 
the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an 
evil. If it were possible to confine the consumption of game 
fowl to a number equal to the annual increase, the world 
would be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be 
by checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the smaller 
* Die HerzogtMmer Schleswig und Holstein , i, p. 203. 
7 
