The Condor/Volume 9/Number 2/Apropos of Egg-collecting
APROPOS OF EGG-COLLECTING
Editor The Condor:
Some of those who read your pages have been both interested and amused at the trend of the controversies in the matter of egg-collecting. There is a broad streak of humor in the matter-of-factness with which the opponents of egg-collecting take themselves so seriously that their position would, if universally admitted, utterly obliterate every other domain of bird study than their own from the curricula of that great University in which all thoughtful men are students. But biological investigation is not all of knowledge; even as the esthetik which weaves its own poesy about the devious pursuits of the ultra-collector is not all of life. Those who fume and fulminate against the egg-collector would seem utterly to over-look the educative element in collecting.
To illustrate: Correspondence in which, with aims largely personal he has been engaged during the past two years, has brought the writer into contact with a large number of bird students. Many of these have been known, at least by name, to some of us for many years. As we remember them twenty years ago, they were just egg-collectors—nothing else. Today they are students of bird life. No more exact investigators than a few of them are to be found in all the ranks of the American Ornithologists' Union. If, then, the acquiring of scientific data be a summum bonum, surely the early and erratic and impulsive career of every one of these "bird-men" has been richly worth the while.
A generation ago there was many a boy who spent the bulk of his spare time in turning somersaults or in standing on his head. Thus he learned the ins and the outs of the wrong-side-ups and the right-side-downs of things. And today, with the putting away of childish things, these same amusing acrobats are building rail-roads, digging canals and tunnels—are strenuously "getting after" the sundry octopi that have so wondrously thriven of late in the troubled seas of American commerce.
If, then, the faddists who teach "nature-studied-to-death" for reward, and the grafters who oppose legitimate collecting, from behind the fortresses of Fish-and-Game Commissions, for gain, will broaden their horizon and open up the chambers of their souls just a little, to let in a mite of that broad generous air in which the sense of humor and of poesy bring to myriad souls exhilaration, rest and peace, this weary old world may possibly become a more comfortable and healthful place to live in. For "the life is more than meat". The soul is peer of the mind. And Man is more than the Polyp or the Monad. If we may, let us have peace: if not, let us at least war on mutual terms, and on neutral ground.
(Rev.) P. B. Peabody.