John Burroughs. P. S.--Just as I finished the above, I came upon the following in the Poughkeepsie _Sunday Courier_: "We noticed recently an item asking whether wild pigeons are returning. Sullivan County people seem to be taking the lead in answering the question, but a Dutchess County farmer named David Rosell, living near Fishkill Plains, who was familiar with the aforesaid birds in old days, reports having seen a flock of about thirty feeding on his buckwheat patch one morning last week, which gives evidence that the birds are not extinct as supposed, but a flock may merely be taking a tour around the world like Magellan of old. Mr. Rosell stated that he had not seen any before in about forty years. At first sight, he could hardly believe his eyes, but he was not long in becoming convinced of their identity." CHAPTER XVI The Pigeon in Manitoba[G] By George E. Atkinson [Footnote G: This paper was read at a meeting of the Manitoba Historical and Scientific Society at Winnepeg in 1905, by the author, a naturalist, residing at Portage la Prairie.] While the biological history of any country records the decrease and disappearance of many forms of life due to just or unjust circumstances, it remains for the historical records of North America to reveal a career of human selfishness which may be considered the paragon. Within four centuries of North American civilization (or modified barbarism) we can be credited with the wiping into the past of at least three species of animal life originally so phenomenally abundant and so strikingly characteristic in themselves as to evoke the wonder and amazement of the entire world. And, sad to relate, so effectual has been the extermination, that it is doubtful if our descendants a few generations hence will be able to learn anything whatever about them save through the medium of books. While herein again we shall be just subjects of their censure for having manifestly failed to preserve in history's archives any material amount of specific information. The early settlers landing upon the Atlantic coast between Newfoundland and the Carolinas found them in possession of armies of great auks, and the few scraps of authenticated history which we now possess disclose a most iniquitous course of wanton slaughter and destruction which ended in the complete extinction of the bird over sixty years ago. Yet in the face of this destruction there remain but four mounted specimens and two eggs in the collections of North America to-day, while but seventy skins remain in the collections of the entire world.