"You cannot with a scalpel find the poet's soul,
Nor yet the wild bird's song."
Edited by Mrs. Mabel Osgood Wright (President of the Audubon Society of the State of Connecticut), Fairfield, Conn., to whom all communications relating to the work of the Audubon and other Bird Protective Societies should be addressed. Reports, etc., designed for this department should be sent at least one month prior to the date of publication.
DIRECTORY OF STATE AUDUBON SOCIETIES
With names and addresses of their Secretaries.
| New Hampshire | Mrs. F. W. Batchelder, Manchester. |
| Massachusetts | Miss Harriet E. Richards, care Boston Society of Natural History, Boston. |
| Rhode Island | Mrs. H. T. Grant, Jr., 187 Bowen street, Providence. |
| Connecticut | Mrs. William Brown Glover, Fairfield. |
| New York | Miss Emma H. Lockwood, 243 West Seventy-fifth street, New York City. |
| New Jersey | Miss Anna Haviland, 53 Sandford Ave., Plainfield, N. J. |
| Pennsylvania | Mrs. Edward Robins, 114 South Twenty-first street, Philadelphia. |
| District of Columbia | Mrs. John Dewhurst Patten, 3033 P street, Washington. |
| Wheeling, W. Va. (branch of Pa. Society) | Elizabeth I. Cummins, 1314 Chapline street, Wheeling. |
| Ohio | Miss Clara Russell, 903 Paradrome street, Cincinnati. |
| Indiana | Amos W. Butler, State House, Indianapolis. |
| Illinois | Miss Mary Drummond, Wheaton. |
| Iowa | Miss Nellie S. Board, Keokuk. |
| Wisconsin | Mrs. George W. Peckham, 646 Marshall street, Milwaukee. |
| Minnesota | Mrs. J. P. Elmer, 314 West Third street, St. Paul. |
| Tennessee | Mrs. C. C. Conner, Ripley, |
| Texas | Miss Cecile Seixas, 2008 Thirty-ninth street, Galveston. |
| California | Mrs. George S. Gay, Redlands. |
Consistency.
Audubonites may be divided into two classes as regards their attitude toward the wearing of feathers,—the moderates and the total abstainers.
The moderates hold that they violate none of the interests of bird protection in its fullest sense by wearing the plumes of game or food birds, or those of the Ostrich, which is as legitimately raised for its feathers as a sheep for its wool. In short, they see the necessity of keeping feather-wearing within conservative bounds, and elect to take the individual responsibility of so doing.
The total abstainers say: "Let us break ourselves altogether of the feather wearing habit. We shall be more conspicuously consistent as bird protectionists, and we shall not be called upon to settle fine points and follow difficult boundaries. We need not know anything about plumage, and never have to decide whether the wings used by milliners are really those of food birds, or the pinions of song birds disguised with dye. Or if the fearfully manufactured confections are the heads of real Owls and Parrots twisted out of all semblance to nature, or merely compounds of Chicken feathers and celluloid." Both of these attitudes are equally useful to the cause if they are maintained consistently, but inevitably the way of the total abstainers is the easier of the two. The total abstainers need not, to quote Hamlet, "know a hawk from a handsaw." While, in order to be consistent, the moderates must be bird students of no mean intelligence if they would keep safely on the exceedingly narrow pathway that divides the feathers that may be, from those that must not be worn, not alone by Audubonites, but by any woman who has either sense or sensibility. A pathway? A slack wire is the better simile, so treacherous is the footing.