"_I know no way of judging of the Future but by the Past_."
--_Patrick Henry_.

REPORT

of a select committee of the Senate of Ohio, in 1857, on a bill proposed
to protect the passenger pigeon.

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"The passenger pigeon needs no protection. Wonderfully prolific, having
the vast forests of the North as its breeding grounds, traveling
hundreds of miles in search of food, it is here to-day and elsewhere
to-morrow, and no ordinary destruction can lessen them, or be missed
from the myriads that are yearly produced."

"The snipe (_Scolopax wilsonii_) needs no protection.... The snipe, too,
like the pigeon, will take care of itself, and its yearly numbers can
not be materially lessened by the gun."

[Illustration: THE LAST LIVING PASSENGER PIGEON
Now in the Cincinnati Zoological Gardens. Twenty years old in 1912.
Copyright 1911, by Enno Meyer.]

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THE FOLLY OF 1857 AND THE LESSON OF 1912

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