and wishing to place the responsibility on the boys and girls, offered to provide a cherry tree or mulberry tree for every box erected, provided they should be properly planted and diligently cared for.

This was practically the culmination of the most unique bird scheme ever attempted, and yesterday was the day set apart for the distribution of these hundreds of fruit trees, the products of which are to be divided share and share alike with the birds.

Nowhere else has such a scheme been attempted, and never before has there been just such a day of jubilee.  The intense interest manifested by the children, and the earnest enthusiasm manifested, leaves no doubt about their carrying out their part of the contract.

[Illustration:  DISTRIBUTING BIRD BOXES AND FRUIT TREES]

Up to date (1912) Mr. Phillips has given away about 1,000 bird boxes, 1,500 cherry and Russian mulberry trees, and transformed the schools of Carrick into seething masses of children militantly enthusiastic in the protection of birds, and in providing them with homes and food.  As a final coup, Mr. Phillips has induced the city of Pittsburgh to create the office of City Ornithologist, at a salary of $1200 per year.  The duty of the new officer is to protect all birds in the city from all kinds of molestation, especially when nesting; to erect bird-houses, provide food for wild birds, on a large scale, and report annually upon the increase or decrease of feathered residents and visitors.  Mr. Frederic S. Webster, long known as a naturalist and practical ornithologist, has been appointed to the position, and is now on active duty.

So far as we are aware, Pittsburgh is the first city to create the office of City Ornithologist.  It is a happy thought; it will yield good results, and other cities will follow Pittsburgh’s good example.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XLII

THE ETHICS OF SPORTSMANSHIP

I count it as rather strange that American and English sportsmen have hunted and shot for a century, and until 1908 formulated practically nothing to establish and define the ethics of shooting game.  Here and there, a few unwritten principles have been evolved, and have become fixed by common consent; but the total number of these is very few.  Perhaps this has been for the reason that every free and independent sportsman prefers to be a law unto himself.  Is it not doubly strange, however, that even down to the present year the term “sportsmen” never has been defined by a sportsman!

Forty years ago, a sportsman might have been defined, according to the standards of that period, as a man who hunts wild game for pleasure.  Those were the days wherein no one foresaw the wholesale annihilation of species, and there were no wilderness game preserves.  In those days, gentlemen shot female hoofed game, trapped bears if they felt like it, killed ten times as much big game as they could use, and no one made any fuss whatever about the waste or extermination of wild life.