m to have a number of sets of the same bird so as to show all
possible variations. I hear of a private collection that contains twelve
sets of kingbirds' eggs, eight sets of house-wrens' eggs, four sets
mocking-birds' eggs, etc.; sets of eggs taken in low trees, high trees,
medium trees; spotted sets, dark sets, plain sets, and light sets of the
same species of bird. Many collections are made on this latter plan.

Thus are our birds hunted and cut off and all in the name of science; as
if science had not long ago finished with these birds. She has weighed
and measured, and dissected, and described them, and their nests, and
eggs, and placed them in her cabinet; and the interest of science and
of humanity now demands that this wholesale nest-robbing cease. These
incidents I have given above, it is true, are but drops in the bucket,
but the bucket would be more than full if we could get all the facts.
Where one man publishes his notes, hundreds, perhaps thousands, say
nothing, but go as silently about their nest-robbing as weasels.

It is true that the student of ornithology often feels compelled to take
bird-life. It is not an easy matter to "name all the birds without a
gun," though an opera-glass will often render identification entirely
certain, and leave the songster unharmed; but once having mastered the
birds, the true ornithologist leaves his gun at home. This view of the
case may not be agreeable to that desiccated mortal called the "closet
naturalist," but for my own part the closet naturalist is a person with
whom I have very little sympathy. He is about the most wearisome and
profitless creature in existence. With his piles of skins, his cases of
eggs, his laborious feather-splitting, and his outlandish nomenclature,
he is not only the enemy of the birds but the enemy of all those who
would know them rightly.

Not the collectors alone are to blame for the diminishing numbers of our
wild birds, but a large share of the responsibility rests upon quite a
different class of persons, namely, the milliners. False taste in dress
is as destructive to our feathered friends as are false aims in science.
It is said that the traffic in the skins of our brighter plumaged
birds, arising from their use by the milliners, reaches to hundreds of
thousands annually. I am told of one middleman who collected from the
shooters in one district, in four months, seventy thousand skins. It
is a barbarous taste that craves this kind of