If “by their works ye shall know them,” then no man can say that the men referred to have been conspicuous on the firing line in defense of assaulted wild life.  In their hearts, we know that in an academic way the naturalists of America do care about wild-life slaughter, and the extermination of species; and we also know that perhaps fifty American zoologists have at times taken an active and serious interest in protection work.

I am speaking now of the general body of museum directors and curators; professors and teachers of zoology in our institutions of learning—­a legion in themselves; teachers of nature study in our secondary schools; investigators and specialists in state and government service; the taxidermists and osteologists; and the array of literary people who, like all the foregoing, make their bread and butter out of the exploitation of wild life.

Taken as a whole, the people named above constitute a grand army of at least five thousand trained, educated, resourceful and influential persons.  They all depend upon wild life for their livelihood.  When they talk about living things, the public listens with respectful attention.  Their knowledge of the value of wild life would be worth something to our cause; but thus far it never has been capitalized!

These people are hard workers; and when they mark out definite courses and attainable goals, they know how to get results.  Yet what do we see?

For sixty long years, with the exception of the work of a corporal’s guard of their number, this grand army has remained in camp, partly neglecting and partly refusing to move upon the works of the enemy.  For sixty years, with the exception of the non-game-bird law, as a class and a mass they have left to the sportsmen of the country the dictating of laws for the protection of all the game birds, the mammals and the game fishes.  When we stop to consider that the game birds alone embrace 154 very important species, the appalling extent to which the zoologist has abdicated in favor of the sportsman becomes apparent.

It is a very great mistake, and a wrong besides, for the zoologists of the country to abandon the game birds, mammals and fishes of North America to the sportsmen, to do with as they please!  Yet that is practically what has been done.

The time was, thirty or forty years ago, when wild life was so abundant that we did not need to worry about its preservation.  That was the golden era of study and investigation.  That era ended definitely in 1884, with the practical extermination of the wild American bison, partly through the shameful greed and partly through the neglect of the American people.  We are now living in the middle of the period of Extermination! The questions for every American zoologist and every sportsman to answer now are:  Shall the slaughter of species go on to a quick end of the period?  Shall we give posterity a birdless, gameless, fishless continent, or not?  Shall we have close seasons, all over the country, for five or ten years, or for five hundred years?