Forest and Stream 
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NEW YORK, SATURDAY, AUGUST 21 , 1909 . 
I VOL. LXX1II, 
I No. 127 Franklin St. 
— 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL. 
Copyright, 1909, by Forest and Stream Publishing Co. 
George Bird Grinnell, President, 
Charles B. Reynolds, Secretary, 
Louis Dean Speir, Treasurer, 
127 Franklin Street, New York. 
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, 1S73. 
STERN NATURE. 
i Most of us, untrained to observe, think of 
'Nature as a kindly mother. We see how the 
wild things are fed, how they are taught to 
live their lives, and so to preserve them. All 
about us we behold the lavishness with which 
mtouched Nature supplies the needs of plant 
md animal life. As we personify Nature we 
attribute to her the tender love that the animal 
mother feels for her offspring and her impulse 
:o give them protection when they most need it. 
The figure that we use is charming, yet it is 
far from true—a mere product of our sentiment. 
Nature is stern, uncompromising and relent¬ 
less; her rule is a rule of law; about her there 
is none of the gentleness, the tenderness, the 
yielding of the animal mother, untiring in her 
.efforts to care for her children. If the laws 
that Nature has laid down are transgressed, suf- 
jfering and often destruction will follow. Some 
of these rules are known, very many are un- 
•cnown, but whether the transgression be inten¬ 
tional or unwitting, the punishment follows. 
Dften to our unintelligent judgment the punish- 
nent appears wholly causeless, wholly unneces¬ 
sary. Yet it is as certain—and to our eyes as 
:ruel—as when the little child strays on the rail¬ 
road track just in front of the onrushing train 
ind is ground to fragments. 
Along the northern border of its range the 
Virginia quail may flourish for years, rearing 
its large broods, wintering in the swamps, com¬ 
ing out in spring with but little loss to still fur¬ 
ther increase in numbers. At last comes a win¬ 
ter of hard cold, of deep snows, and some night 
toward the end of the winter a heavy snow storm 
buries all the broods of quail over a wide dis¬ 
trict, and the weather turning warm and then 
freezing, a hard crust is formed, imprisoning 
•them, so that they cannot escape and must 
perish. 
, In late May or early June, after song birds 
have come and mated and built their nests and 
are hatching their young, a furious storm ot 
wind and driving rain may overturn ten thou¬ 
sand nests and hurl eggs and young to the 
ground to die of cold. 
On the islands of the Gulf of Mexico where 
uncounted thousands of sea birds yearly rear 
uncounted thousands of young, there often come 
in the breeding season—as there came this year 
in early June and again in mid July—terrible 
storms, raising tumultuous seas, which at last 
sweep over the low islands where the birds have 
built their nests, chilling the eggs and drowning 
the young birds—destroying the increase for a 
year. 
We see these things happen constantly, but 
we do not know why they happen. Yet seeing 
them we are able to look a little below the sur¬ 
face, and to realize something of our ignorance 
of the immutable laws that govern the processes 
of life that are constantly going on about us. 
Civilized man—disturber of the balance of 
nature and destroyer of every wild thing which 
he can turn to his own advantage—is only now 
beginning to learn something of the inter-rela¬ 
tions of wild life and the agriculture on which 
he depends. So far as in him lies, he should 
endeavor to mitigate the harshness of nature 
toward many of the useful birds and animals, 
whose old time refuges he himself has de¬ 
stroyed. He should do what he can to protect 
these animals from their natural enemies and 
from the hostilities of climate. 
POPULAR PLACES. 
Two most useful public institutions in New 
York are the New York Aquarium, situated at 
Battery Park at the lower end of the city, and 
the Zoological Park in the Bronx, at the upper 
end. Managed by the New York Zoological 
Society, both contain large collections of living 
things and both are—in practice—free to the 
public. Under the direction of broad-minded 
business and scientific men, they are conducted 
with the sole purpose of giving to the public en¬ 
joyment and instruction. While both have a 
high educational value, the innocent pleasure 
which they afford may well be regarded as 
equalling this in importance—the more so be¬ 
cause it is given in very large measure to a 
section of the public whose enjoyments are few 
and whom stern necessity obliges to count the 
cost of each indulgence. To this portion of 
New York’s residents the privilege of visiting 
such collections is an enormous boon. 
Each year these institutions are visited by 
the public in great numbers. Millions of 
people crowd into them to see the living things 
on View and their popularity continues to in¬ 
crease. Situated in a densely populated portion 
of the city, the Aquarium has more visitors than 
the Zoological Park, and for July of this year 
the attendance at the Aquarium reached the 
extraordinary figure of 528,266, an average of 
17,040 persons per day. Up to the 2d of August 
the attendance for 1909 was over 2,000,000. 
The public does not comprehend the heavy 
debt which it owes to the New York Zoological 
Society, and to the accomplished men directly 
in charge of the two institutions. Charles H. 
-No. 8. 
, New York. 
Townsend, the director of the Aquarium, is a 
very eminent authority on fish, fish culture and 
the distribution of American fishes, reptiles, 
birds and mammals; and Dr. W. T. Hornaday 
is the author of many books on natural history, 
sport and life in the open. To these two gen¬ 
tlemen, working under Prof. Henry Fairfield 
Osborn and Madison Grant, the Zoological So¬ 
ciety’s secretary, and to the executive committee 
of the Zoological Society, New York city owes 
a debt which it can never pay. 
SALMON STUDY. 
Little by little students are acquiring knowl¬ 
edge bearing on the life of the salmon. It is 
now believed that new light has been shed on 
its habit of abstaining from food while in fresh 
water. 
The Fishing Gazette says that the most in¬ 
teresting thing in the twenty-seventh annual re¬ 
port of the Scottish Fishery Board is a portrait 
and account of a male kelt salmon which was 
kept for a whole year in a place where it could 
get no food. Professor Noel Paton, who ex¬ 
amined the fish for Mr. Calderwood, said that 
the fish was extraordinarily poor in fat. The 
fish had twelve months previously been stripped 
of its milt for fertilizing salmon eggs (it was 
only a small fish, 5 pounds), and had been kept 
all the year in a space 6 feet by 12 feet, with 
only about a foot of water in it. Yet in cap¬ 
tivity and for twelve months without food its 
milt had again ripened, and was successfully 
used for impregnating ova before it was killed. 
The photograph does not give that impression 
of emaciation which one would expect from so 
long a fast and enforced absence from salt 
water. The moral is an eye-opener for those 
who think that salmon cannot live even six 
months in fresh water without feeding. 
There will be published in these columns 
shortly an exceedingly interesting paper on “The 
Scales of the Atlantic Salmon, as Indicative of 
the Life History of the Fish.” The author, 
whose nom de plume is “Silver Mitchell,” is 
well known to many of our older readers. Be¬ 
sides writing of many of the little-known salmon 
rivers of Newfoundland and Labrador, he has 
contributed valuable data to the literature of the 
salmon and its habits. He was one of the first 
Americans to take up the study of salmon scales, 
and in his paper he gives the results of his work, 
‘together with a number of enlarged illustrations. 
Another paper of unusual interest that is soon 
to appear has been contributed by Andrew Gray 
Weeks, and relates to hardships and dangers 
encountered by collectors of butterflies in the 
tropics and elsewhere. He also describes the 
methods followed by the actual collectors in the 
field and by the owners of collections in identi¬ 
fying rare or new specimens—work that often 
occupies months or years. 
