FOREST AND STREAM 
335 
ing from Virginia, North Carolina and Tennes¬ 
see, which were liberated in the more acces¬ 
sible portions of our territory. Some few birds 
were obtained from Florida and these retained 
their distinctive marking through the third 
generation, being much darker on the throat 
and breast. These birds were even smaller 
than the western quail but caught up with 
them in about five years. 
After the almost total destruction of our 
native birds by snow storms the liberated 
quail, let out in March, nested freely and re¬ 
plenished the preserve by the following au¬ 
tumn. The Florida birds increased more 
rapidly, that is to say, produced larger bevies 
than any of the birds that we liberated, but 
we very quickly desisted from buying them 
because we found that a whole bevy would 
light in trees instead of on the ground; al¬ 
though it is fair to say that subsequently they 
outgrew' this habit and acted like the origi¬ 
nal native birds. 
The success of the transplanting I have just 
described really depended on the maintenance 
of our preserve. Left to themselves, without 
adequate protection, the birds would have suc¬ 
cumbed quickly to the free shooting that pre¬ 
vails on unprotected land. This brings up the 
important question of the value of the preserve 
in the protection of game. Probably no other 
one factor is of greater importance than the 
preserve in increasing the supply. Speaking 
broadly, there are two ways of attempting to 
protect game—that practiced in this country 
and that practiced in Europe and it is worth 
while to attempt to compare the two methods. 
In this country we have a mass of detailed 
legislation, all well meant and with the honest 
purpose of protecting the game supply. The 
chief characteristic is a multitude of restric¬ 
tions regulationg how game shall be shot or cap¬ 
tured and imposing limits on the daily or sea¬ 
son’s bag for each individual sportsman. Prac¬ 
tically all these laws ignore the rights of the 
farmers and other owners of the land and 
whether by intention or not, are framed almost 
entirely in the interests of that very large 
class of sportsmen who come from the cities 
and towns and who obtain their shooting on 
lands which do not belong to them, without 
paying for it and by counting on the good 
nature of the land owners for their negative 
permission to do so. 
A weakness of our legislation lies in the 
fact that not sufficient police power is pro¬ 
vided to secure enforcement and the further 
fact that even if there were sufficient police 
power it would be exceedingly difficult to ob¬ 
tain a strict enforcement of the bag limits. 
A greater weakness still lies in the fact that 
our legislation is not founded on the right 
principle. It aims at protection only by en¬ 
deavoring to restrict the number of birds 
killed instead of striving for means by which 
the amount of game can be increased. If 
the amount of game in a district can be in¬ 
creased the restrictions as to the bag limit 
may become a matter of indifference. In ex¬ 
treme cases too much restriction of shooting 
may even effect a decrease. For example, it 
is a well-known fact that on a Southern plan¬ 
tation where all shooting of quail is stopped 
for a series of years the number of birds on 
that plantation tends to decrease. 
On the other side of the ocean, and espe¬ 
cially in England and Scotland, they go at the 
problem in a very different way. Instead of 
a mass of laws which would require for their 
enforcement a great police force they adopt 
this course: for all practical purposes they say 
to the land owners—“You are more concerned 
in the preservation and increase of the sup¬ 
ply of game than any one else. If we can make 
it worth while, your selfish interests will turn 
you into a great volunteer army of game 
wardens and save the state the expense, 
bother and care of maintaining a police force 
for the enforcement of its game laws.” So the 
land owners have been given the benefit of 
two rather simple weapons of legislation—a 
trespass law which has effectually stopped 
trespassing and a gun license law which has 
effectually reduced the army of shooters. An 
interesting point about the gun licenses in 
England is that they are sold to all alike, resi¬ 
dent or non-resident, for short periods or for 
the year, and the highest price charged is $ 15 . 
Given these two weapons to protect them¬ 
selves, the land owners soon realized that the 
crop of game was in its way as important as 
any other crop, and that if they themselves 
did not care to shoot, the right to shoot could 
be sold to others for a very respectable sum. 
They also found that the larger the crop the 
more they could get for it, so their selfish in¬ 
terests made them study how to increase the 
supply and they succeeded so well by im¬ 
proved methods of keeping down the vermin, 
by limiting the season’s bag for the ground 
and by increasing the food supply that game 
in England and Scotland has, during the past 
hundred years, increased by leaps and bounds. 
The same results could in a measure be ob¬ 
tained in this country provided similar meth¬ 
ods were used, but first the people must be 
educated as to the rights of the land owners 
and the immense value of preserves or re¬ 
stricted areas as a factor in increasing the 
game supply. It has long been a source of 
wonderment to me that the farmers of this 
country do not realize what they are losing 
by neglecting their game crop. In the South 
some progress has been made in this direc¬ 
tion, but the farmers there have yet to learn 
that it lies completely in their own power 
greatly to increase the stock of game on their 
lands. Careful killing of vermin and a limit 
placed by the owner of the covers on the bag 
that might be taken during the season would 
accomplish wonders. Is it not possible that 
by combining the best of our laws and that 
part of the English and Scotch laws best 
adapted to conditions here that we could make 
progress far more rapidly than under present 
conditions? 
THE COMBINATION GUN SIGHT. 
Editor Forest and Stream : 
I think your first three monthly numbers have 
been excellent and as well worth the price as any 
publication I know of. In the 'March number 
I enjoyed very much the article by Will H. 
Thompson. I brought to mind articles by his 
brother Maurice which I have read and greatly 
enjoyed though I never tried archery myself. I 
particularly recall one article printed in Harper’* 
Magazine in 1877, “Hunting With the Long 
Bow,” which I have read many times and still 
read occasionally with much pleasure and in that 
he speaks of his brother Will. 
I have a combination shotgun and rifle made 
by John P. Sauer & Son, which I think a great 
deal of; it is a 20 ga. shot barrel and 25-20 rifle 
and both barrels shoot finely. It has a two-barrel 
rear sight and a hunting bead front sight. When 
I got it the first was marked 80 yards 
and the second 150 yards, so I had to hold over 
about two inches when shooting at shot range, 
which I did not like. I therefore had the notch 
filed out, and it is now complete for hunting. By 
holding so the bead is opposite the top corners 
I get 150 yards and opposite the lower corners 
50 yards or less by slight variation. Of course 
I can’t drive tacks at 100 yards any more than 
others can hit what they can’t see, but a squirrel’s 
head is a possibility in any ordinary tree and 
from long experience this is about all I can ex¬ 
pect at off hand. Stewart Edward White writes 
of putting five shots into a two-inch ring at 200 
yards with open hunting sights but I can’t see 
a two-inch ring at that distance. I find that a 
pin bead sight just covers a two-inch ring at 50 
yards and with Lyman bead sights and a good 
bench rest a two-inch full is small enough for 
me. I have a telescope sight on another rifle 
which I occasionally drive tack= At rest at 50 
yards. I often think of a gun or half gun that 
is called a “game getter” and which shoots 22- 
inch caliber rifle and 41 shot cartridge, and com¬ 
pare it in thought with my combination gun. much 
to the credit of mine, and ask myself which is 
the better “game getter.” 
C. H. McEVOY. 
A THEORY OF THE SURF CAST. 
I have to submit to the surf casting world a 
theory of the cast. I was tempted to call it a 
new theory, but as I have never seen any other 
theory advanced, perhaps it is the only one that 
exists. 
It consists of a lead traveling forward, crowd¬ 
ing aside the air it encounters, and tending to 
form a vacuum behind it. Into this incipient 
vacuum the displaced air swirls and moves for¬ 
ward at a lower speed than the lead, thus per¬ 
mitting more and more air to come into the 
front of the moving volume. The line following 
the lead tends to take the character of a cone 
to the cylindrically formed volume of moving air, 
but is moving at a more rapid rate than air im¬ 
mediately surrounding it. The progress of the 
line thus tends to continue the cylindrical volume 
of air in its forward movement, which aids in 
holding the line to its course. In conjunc¬ 
tion with the above goes a reel thumbed down 
with such nicety that at the instant the lead 
passes the highest point in its trajectory all pres¬ 
sure may be removed and the revolving spool 
permitted to jump the line forward giving it an 
initial motion which is easily continued by the 
portion of line already gone forward, so that 
the lead coasts downward on a long slant. 
In other words, the lead punches a hole in 
the air and the reel pushes the line through it. 
This is a rather facetious way of stating what 
appears to be a fact, but I hope the editor will 
publish it at once before some of those Mid¬ 
land Beach or Ocean City sharps catch up with 
it independently. 
SWITCH REEL. 
