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