On Scientific Collecting 
A former member of the Illinois Audubon Society recently re- 
signed because its affiliate, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, collected 
birds for scientific specimens. There is no subject under the sun but 
must engage a difference of opinion. A just and temperate person 
will respect an opposite view. So do we now with respect to that of 
our former member. However, it now seems proper to present our 
ideas of the matter. 
When shall man cease to destroy Nature? Shall it be when she 
has met his physical requirements—-when her forests have been cut, 
her rivers diverted, her swamps drained? When her rich meadows 
have been made arid and her beasts, feral and domestic, have been 
killed for food and raiment? Or shall it be when his intellectual 
needs, too, have been answered? What of knowledge? What of books 
and pictures? The destruction of trees for the pulpwood out of which 
a “bird book” is made may result more disastrously to continuing 
bird population than the killing of the specimens required by the artist 
for its illustrations. 
There is too much complexity in human affairs, especially as they 
affect Nature, to cast out that which has not been proved worthless. 
Crows and wolves must not take possession of the land. Neither is 
it well to extinguish them, knowing no more than we do of their place. 
Lumbermen and engineers must not take possession of the land. 
Neither should their kind utterly perish. So, too, of men whose devo- 
tion is to natural history and the maintenance of museums by which 
its studies are possible. 
Without natural history museums there would have been no 
Ridgway, no Chapman, no Fuertes, no Forbush, no Eaton, no Florence 
Merriam Bailey, no Roberts, no Bent, no Howell. Without the knowl- 
edge which these have made available it is questionable whether 
Audubon societies would flourish as at present. It is certain that they 
would not exist save for Audubon, whose name they bear, not because 
he killed birds but because he delighted in them. 
It may be fairly conceded that those who contribute the largest 
sums to the work of Audubon societies are able to do so because with- 
out malice, but inconsiderately and perhaps unwittingly, changing the 
face of thousands of acres of land, they have destroyed the habitats 
of many disappearing species. They who destroy would fain protect. 
If this is true of some industrialists may it not be true of some scien- 
tists? It was true of Audubon. 
EDWARD R. Forp, Newago, Mich. 
19 
