part, and so have squirrels, snakes, and other enemies, and 
last, but not least, cats. One year, in nine months, the New 
York Humane Society killed 53,938 cats. These cats, being 
of the tramp variety which lives by hunting, had probably 
eaten in their nine lives many times that number of birds. 
I think a household pussy is a most ingratiating animal, but 
I should like to see each one wearing a bell from March to 
October, so that its tinkle might betray its presence to the 
birds. 
When I was a child, I always skipped the cases of “stuffed 
birds” at the museums and gave my attention to more 
thrilling objects. I do not skip them now, but find them 
absorbingly interesting and an effective aid to bird study. 
Every student ought to have a good collection of our native 
birds to refer to. Private collections are mostly unnecessary. 
Those in the museums are better mounted, better classified, 
and more complete, and are to be found in every large city. 
The great work carried on in institutions of science, the 
anatomical study of specimens and their classification — 
this is a large part of the science of ornithology, and is the 
foundation on which a knowledge of birds must rest, but I 
am glad I have the results of the work and do not have to do 
any of it myself. Even Elliott Coues, our great ornithol- 
ogist, who had shot and collected birds by the thousand, 
never got quite hardened to it. He says in despatching a 
wounded bird by pressing the lungs with the finger and thumb 
that “after a painful shiver light fades from the eyes and the 
lids close. I assure you it will make you wince the first few 
times,” he says. “You had better habitually hold the poor 
creature behind you.” Did you ever think that a bird is the 
only animal which in dying closes its eyes? ‘The lids fall as 
life leaves the body. 
But it is not of the dead bird I want to talk to you, not of 
the stiff form on a hat or in a glass case, but of the living 
creature who breathes nearly twice as fast as we do, whose 
blood bounds through his veins at such hot speed that a bird 
is of all created animals the fullest of energy and life; of the 
bird that sings his ecstatic lay from the tree top, flashes 
across the road, circles over the field, sweeps the surface of 
the lake, and leaves a trail of its own joyousness behind it. 
You do not need a scientific education to study living 
birds — you can just be an amateur — one who loves them. 
In old days almost all the books relating to natural science 
were written in Latin, which would dampen the ardor of 
most of us. Now a hundred simply written, untechnical, 
intelligent books on birds are to be had at the shops in tongues 
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