My young friends, I want to humbly ask your forgiveness for having taken a small part in the destruction of this, the most exciting of sport. And there is not one of us but is ashamed of the slaughter which has robbed you of enjoyment. If we had been restrained by laws of humanity, you, too, could have enjoyed this sport for years to come. CHAPTER XIV A Novel Theory of Extinction By C. H. Ames and Robert Ridgway Boston, March 8, 1906. Mr. W. B. Mershon: Dear Sir:--Thank you for your note of the third in reply to mine of the first, in regard to your book on the Passenger Pigeon. I note that you say: "There is room to make additions if you think you have something that would be interesting, and would like to submit it to me for my consideration." Thanking you for your courtesy in the matter, I beg to say that I have long had great interest in the problem of the so sudden and complete destruction of this great species, and have from the first been quite unable to believe that the ordinarily assigned agencies for the destruction of the pigeon were adequate, or anywhere near adequate, to make a destruction so sudden and complete. Several accounts which have come to my notice have strengthened my view. I know well that the attack of man and beast upon the pigeons in their rookeries, or breeding places, was fierce, persistent and enormously destructive, and that at these breeding places the destroyers gathered in great numbers, but, with my vivid recollection of the tremendous flights of pigeons which I myself saw in the '60's in northern Illinois, the wide distribution of the bird, and what I know of its migratory habits (I wish I knew very much more about these habits), I cannot think that in so few years the practical destruction of the species could be effected by the means referred to. Years ago--I cannot tell how many, but I am confident it must have been at about the time of the disappearance of the great pigeon flights--I read an account, either in or quoted from a New Orleans newspaper, giving the stories of several ship captains and sailors who had arrived in New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. They stated that they had, in crossing the Gulf, sailed over leagues and leagues of water covered, and covered thickly, with dead pigeons. The supposition was that an enormous flight of the pigeons crossing the waters of the Gulf had been overwhelmed by a cyclone, or some such atmospheric disturbance, and that the birds had been whirled into the surf and drowned. I have been told by competent ornithologists connected with the Boston Society of Natural History that Pigeon Cove, a well-known and much frequented extremity of Cape Ann, near Gloucester, Mass., received its name from the fact that a large flight of pigeons was similarly overwhelmed in flying along the Atlantic near that place, and that their bodies covered the shore in "windrows."