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Forest and Stream Publishing Company 
Chas. A. Hazen, President Charles L. Wise, Treasurer 
Harwood Palmer, Vice-Fres. W. G. Beecroft, Secretary 
22 Thames Street, New York. 
CORRESPONDENCE:—Forest and Stream is the re¬ 
cognized medium of entertainment, instruction and in¬ 
formation between American sportsmen. The editors 
invite communications on the subjects to which its pages 
are devoted, but, of course, are not responsible for the 
views of correspondents. Anonymous communications 
cannot be regarded. 
SUBSCRIPTIONS: $3 a year; $1.50 for six months; 
10 cets. a copy. Canadian, $4 a year; foreign, $4.50 a year. 
This paper may be obtained of newsdealers throughout 
the United States, Canada and Great Britain. Foreign 
Subscriptions and Sales Agents—London: Davies & Co., 
1 Finch Lane; Sampson, Low & Co. Paris: Brentano’s. 
Entered in New York Post Office as Second class matter. 
THE OBJECT OF THIS JOURNAL 
will be to studiously promote a healthful interest 
in outdoor recreation, and to cultivate a refined 
taste for natural objects. 
—Forest and Stream, Aug. 14, 1873 
OBEY THE LAW! 
This paper has no sympathy with the sentiment 
that laws, because they may happen to traverse 
local opinion or interfere with selfish privi¬ 
leges, are made to be broken or ignored. The 
various “Associations” of sportsmen who are de¬ 
manding a restoration of Spring shooting are 
within their rights as long as they make proper 
request on Congress for action, but they are com¬ 
ing dangerously close to criminal boundaries when 
they openly advise people to break the law be¬ 
cause it is unpopular. As Dr. William T. Horn- 
aday well puts it: “To incite lawlessness by in¬ 
flammatory speeches is sedition; and sedition is 
punishable as a misdemeanor, by fine and im¬ 
prisonment. Any attorney who does not know 
this is an object for sympathy.” 
The real sportsmen of America are beginning 
to assert themselves, not only because they have 
seen the property of the state destroyed by toler¬ 
ated lawlessness, but because they are American 
citizens, and believe as all good citizens do, that 
no man is above the law itself. What an appall¬ 
ing destruction there has been in the wild life of 
this country during the past twenty years in utter 
defiance of the law, and for that matter, what an 
appalling waste still goes on! Forest and Stream 
is not in the habit of publishing unverified state¬ 
ments, and the following from the St. Louis Star 
is reproduced not because we know it to be true, 
but because the sentiment which is indicated is all 
too prevalent in this country. 
Talk about the “decimation of wild duck by 
hunters.” Listen to what an old duck hunter has 
to say. This story was told to Ferdinand I. G. 
Knittel by Frank Rosenberger. Mr. Rosenberger 
is one of the old standbys. He has been a duck 
hunter all his life, and during these years has 
been a consistent advocate of game protection 
and by that same token has stood for a-square 
deal for the St. Louis hunter. 
This story deals with the wholesale poisoning 
of wild duck in one instance and in the other with 
the hunting of duck not so far from our own 
FOREST AND STREAM 
doors, by men who declare the provisions of the 
Federal law are “jokes” and they don’t fear en¬ 
forcement. 
“I have a friend,” said Rosenberger to Mr. 
Knittel, “who owns a large acreage in Texas. His 
land runs along the coast and like a great many 
others he has gone in for rice growing. The one 
pest of the rice grower is the wild duck. It is the 
great delicacy relished by water fowl and in their 
migrations, the birds chose this or that field and 
the devastation is immense. 
“Well, this friend of mine told me he had suf¬ 
fered to such an extent and shooting made such 
little progress against the birds that he had his 
men bait out poisoned feed. The ducks did not 
detect the poison and died by the thousands of 
thousands. The employes of my friend picked 
the feathers from the birds. It amounted to 800 
pounds. The meat was buried. That story was 
told me by the friend. It was horrible, but as 
against his crop he believed he had done nothing 
that he should not do. Yet we hear great cries 
against the paltry bag which St. Louis hunters 
gather after traveling great distances and after 
much hardship, diminishing the duck supply. 
“Another little thing. I went down to Mayes 
Station, over in Illinois. I still have the Illinois 
habit. Duck were in that vicinity, near old Wal- 
lact Lake and Fox Lake, and other waters, by the 
thousand. We did not go there to shoot and for 
that matter neither did the natives. But hunters 
came there in automobiles, some of them farm¬ 
ers, and they shot, as a rule, from sunup till 10 
o’clock in the morning, got a limit kill and then 
drove away. They looked on the provisions as 
jokes. No one seemed anxious, or even in a posi¬ 
tion to enforce any of the regulations. It is to 
the credit of the St. Louis hunter that he has 
accepted the law as it was given him.” 
As the writer of the above extract observes. 
“This story should make us ponder.” It should 
do more. It should make us resolve to uphold 
firmly the hands, and support the efforts of every 
agency, official or otherwise, which is working to 
preserve our game from illegal slaughter and cer¬ 
tain extermination. 
A GREAT ANGLING AUTHORITY GONE. 
Anglers all around the world, wherever the 
gentle art of fly-fishing is pursued, will give more 
than a passing thought to the memory of Fred¬ 
eric M. Halford. Very many readers of Forest 
and Stream must know of him as the remarkable 
British exponent of dry-fly fishing, and must have 
grown to know him intimately through his books, 
which overflow with trustworthy information, 
good sense and sound advice. 
Mr. Halford’s death occurred while he was on 
his way home to England from Marseilles, on the 
Mediterranean Coast of France, and the commu¬ 
nity of anglers in Europe has lost its most promi¬ 
nent figure. He was regarded as one of the best 
of dry-fly fishermen, and it is said of him that 
few could cover a trout with such precision or 
handle it with greater skill. Even in remote 
places, where the fip'-:r points of angling have not 
reached, men knew of a mysterious art called dry- 
fly fishing, and that its great prophet was a man 
in England, called Halford. 
In the management of a fishery he was unsur¬ 
passed, and his book thereon, “Making a Fishery,” 
has been widely read and quoted. His own 
fishery at Mottisfont is a model of order and 
health, having been brought to a point of per¬ 
fection. 
To the study of trout and the various natural 
flies to be found in the haunts of trout the de¬ 
ceased sportsman devoted much of his time. As 
a result, the Halford series of dry flies became 
famous. At first he found it necessary to make 
his list of flies embrace one hundred patterns; 
but after years of enthusiastic devotion to expe¬ 
rimenting and classification he pronounced as thor¬ 
oughly equipped the angler having thirty-three 
flies in his flannel-leaved book. He never wearied 
of investigation or experiment, provided he could 
get the result at which he aimed. His “Dry Fly 
Fishing in Theory and Practice” bears testimony 
to his energy, thoroughness and desire for truth. 
Under the nom de plume “Detached Badger,” 
this great dry-fly angler wrote with great fluency 
and imparted much valuable information in the 
columns of the sporting press. But his readers 
declare he never wrote a line without having 
something to say, and that he never made a state¬ 
ment without having excellent grounds for it. 
Whether he was recommending a rod of a cer¬ 
tain balance and action, whether he was advising 
a certain method of handling a weeded fish, 
whether he was giving details about flies or in¬ 
structions for proper management of a fishery, 
his readers knew that he was to be trusted and 
that his counsels might be followed almost blindly. 
One of his most entertaining works as an 
author is “An Angler’s Autobiography.” He was 
one of the oldest members of the Fly Fishers’ 
Club, and his friends recall him as upright, gen¬ 
erous and warm-hearted. 
THE ICHTHYOPHAGI. 
What of the Associations that once filled such 
a prominent place in the angling annals of New 
York? Why, for instance, was the Fishcultural 
Association ever allowed to lapse by title, and 
where is the Ichthyophagous Club, with members 
of brave stomachs and inquiring gastronomic dis¬ 
position? Their dinners and their meetings are 
still remembered, but it is to be feared that of 
those who once formed this goodly society, and 
who still look back to the days of old, few would 
now care or dare to go through the menus that 
the annual gatherings provided. United States 
senators, mayors, and high officials, men the very 
flower of our civilization, were wont to grace 
these festive occasions, and without turning pale, 
to brave all the mysteries of banquets “loaded” 
for the tenderfoot. 
Mighty men they were. Does their like exist in 
the present generation? True, our younger 
anglers and hunters in New York come together 
once a- year or oftener and frighten their wives 
or women folk afterward by recitations of what 
was offered in the way of unusual food. With¬ 
out disparaging this modern reversion to the fare 
of the cave man or, put it in another way, to 
curious experimentation in search of new food 
values, do the modern efforts come up to those 
of the older days of the Ichthyophagi, when one 
felt after an evening reunion not only Ichthy- 
ophagic, but had a mysterious feeling that there 
was something Anthropophagic as well in his 
make-up? Looking over an old file of Forest and 
Stream the other day, we ran across a bit of 
poetic fancy which started thus: 
“When the Ichthyophagous dines 
There’ll be many a curious dish 
Of things ne’er caught with lines. 
And not at all like fish— 
Steaks of porpoise and ribs of whales, 
Salmi of muskrat and beaver tails, 
Aspic of jellyfish, octopus stew, 
Shark-fin soup and gurry-gur-roo, 
When the Ichthyophagous dines.” 
Is there any hope that some one will revive this 
old club? Probably a number of our squeamish 
readers will ask, is there any use of doing so? 
