Hornaday
William Temple, an American naturalist. He was born at Plainfield, Indiana, in 1854, and was reared on an Iowa farm. He was interested in animal life and made a special study of zoology. He has traveled, hunted, and collected extensively in the West; also in India, the Malay Archipelago, and South America. He has discovered a number of animals new to science, and has made valuable scientific collections. Among the larger animals that have fallen before his rifle are the elephant, tiger, orange, grizzly bear, puma, bison, buffalo, mountain sheep, goat, antelope, deer, elk, and moose. Perhaps no man living has made a more systematic or intelligent study of wild animals, birds, reptiles, and fishes in their native homes. He has never hunted for sport.
In 1882-90 he was chief taxidermist of the United States National Museum. Six years later he was appointed director of the New York Zoological Park, a position he still holds. Here he has supervised the collection and management of what is in many respects the most extensive and valuable collection of wild animals in existence. His administration is marked by extreme neatness. The animals are kept in the best of health; the premises are free from the offensive odors so unfortunately prevalent in many gardens.
Mr. Hornaday is well known personally all over the world. Not long since, he was called up at night by a messenger boy with a cablegram from the French Congo country, offering him a young elephant. He immediately cabled an acceptance. The elephant is now in the Park. Whenever he hears of a desirable animal and the funds of the Park do not permit its purchase, he applies to Mr. Carnegie or some other wealthy man, and never, it is said, in vain.
Mr. Hornaday has written a number of books, including Two Years in the Jungle, Free Rum on the Congo, The Extermination of the American Bison, Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting, The Man Who Became a Savage, and The American Natural History. The last is far the best book of the sort for young Americans that has been written. We make room for two paragraphs from his incisive preface:
By natural inclination, every child is interested in animals. Whenever a grown person is not so interested, it is positive proof that the natural instincts of childhood either have been turned aside or stifled by lack of opportunity to live and grow. The love for animals is, I believe, even more universal than the love for music. . . . Students in the highest grammar-school grades, the high schools, normal schools, academies, and small colleges are so inadequately equipped for the study of natural history that fully ninety-five per cent of them, including also the great mass of students from the higher colleges and universities, enter active life ignorant of even the most important forms of the wild life of our own country! If this statement can be disproved, the author will be delighted to withdraw it, and apologize.
The interest taken by Mr. Hornaday in our wild animals is shown in the closing statements of a communication to Collier's for November 13, 1909:
We have no longer any wild bison, save one small band of about twenty. The elk remains with us only in the Yellow-stone region and the Olympic Mountains of Washington, plus a few individuals in a few other localities. Antelope exist in widely scattered bands, to the number of about five thousand. The big-horn mountain sheep is now rarely seen in the United States, and it is threatened with total extinction at an early date outside of the game preserves. The mountain goat is not yet so rare in the United States as the mastodon, but wherever it may legally be hunted it soon will be. The passenger pigeon is gone forever. The heath hen (of Massachusetts) may be blotted out any year. The pinnated grouse of the West now exists in a few localities only. The splendid sage grouse is fast being shot off the cattle plains and soon will disappear. The great whooping crane is very nearly extinct. The trumpeter swan is so nearly extinct that skins are not procurable. The California condor will last about twenty years longer. The Labrador duck and great auk are quite extinct. The "plume birds" of Florida are but little more than a memory; and so are the scarlet ibis, roseate spoonbill, and flamingo. The fur seal has been reduced from four million to about thirty thousand only; and if the United States government does not quickly execute with Canada and Japan a new treaty, providing for it a ten-year close season, the species is doomed!