Next to the gamekeeper, who, after all, is but the instrument of the game-shooter, and the “collector” (whose crimes in respect of our rarer avifauna would fill a volume), the worst sinners are those gun-sportsmen whose amusement is the wanton destruction of wild life, without even the flimsy pretext that their victims are eatable. Nothing comes amiss to them--from seals,[19] and rare birds like the osprey and the great northern diver, to seagulls, shore-birds, and waders, and even poor little pipits and thrushes. These are the folk of whom Sir Harry Johnston has truly observed that “they are often not nearly so interesting, physically and mentally, as the creatures they destroy.” They are dingy-souled Philistines, to whom a dead bird in the hand is worth more than many living birds in the bush. Some even profess themselves bird-lovers.[20] A West Country farmer’s wife once observed to me: “My husband is a great lover of birds; he’s got several cases full of stuffed ones that he shot himself.” This is as though one should prefer an ancient Egyptian mummy to the chance of watching and studying a living breathing being of that race. Little wonder if, when thinking of this senseless and careless and callous destruction of so much feathered loveliness, we should feel inclined to echo Robert Burns’s angry words: “Inhuman man, curse on thy barb’rous art, And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye.” Moreover, the “deep-rooted instinct,” about which we hear so much, can easily be diverted to a far finer, more beautiful, and more useful pleasure than the absurd, antiquated, and useless one of _killing_ for sport. I can speak from my own personal experience in saying that the actual thrill and joy of tracking and watching wild creatures for study and observation is far superior to that which is derived from tracking and watching them for slaughter. In other words, hunting animals to see how they _live_ is finer sport than hunting them to see how they _die_. It seems, therefore, that the real issue is between Natural History as opposed to _Unnatural_ History. On the one hand, grouse, pheasants (“semi-domesticated exotics”), and partridges (very likely imported), reared at immense cost for slaughter: on the other, all these infinitely more varied and natural and gracious creatures--the true sylphs and elves of our woodlands--whose glad, free beauty so thrilled Meredith, and drew from him that impassioned cry: “For joy in the beating of wings on high, … My soul shoots into the breast of a bird, As it will for sheer love till the last long sigh.” And all this wild, winged life possesses a twofold beauty: for it is beautiful both in itself, and--as poetry all down the ages has borne witness--in its influence on the mind of man. FOOTNOTES: [10] “British Mammals,” 1903.