INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS. 
23 
their experience, or to plead the cause of her persecuted and 
almost exterminated game. 
u Within the last few years, indeed, much has been done. A 
whole host of sporting writers have sprung up> in all quarters of 
the land, having their rendezvous and rallying point in the 
columns of the New York Spirit of the Times. 
•“Still, most of these writers have aspired rather to enter¬ 
tain than to instruct; rather to depict scenes and incidents to 
the life, than to draw from those scenes a moral and a theory.” 
Even the beautiful edition of that admirable English work, 
“ Hawker on Shooting”—prepared for the American reader by 
my excellent friend, William T. Porter, known throughout the 
length and breadth of the continent as a thorough and accom¬ 
plished sportsman—does not descend to those minute details of 
the zoological distinctions, nomenclature, and habits of our vari¬ 
ous species of game, which I propose to give to my readers ; nor 
—though abounding with graphic accounts and highly colored 
anecdotes relating to every species of shooting or hunting, does 
it present any views or suggest any means for the preservation 
of game, or for the acquisition of skill in woodcraft and gunnery 
in this country—both being very different on this from what 
they are on the other side of the Atlantic. 
This consideration—connected with another, namely, that for 
the last two years hardly a week has passed without my re¬ 
ceiving a letter from some person addicted to field sports, in all, 
even the remotest, parts of the country, requesting me to suggest 
some plan for the prevention of, what all see to be imminent, the 
total annihilation of game within our borders—has led me to 
believe that the time has airived, when a work of this character 
is called for by the country in general, and is likely to be as well 
received as the deficiencies of its author will permit. 
And now, after these brief introductory observations, I shall 
state what is my plan for the arrangement of this work, and 
thereafter plunge at once in Medias Res. 
In the first place, I propose briefly to ascertain what are the 
game of the United States and Provinces of America—a point 
