IF IT were customary, says a contemporary, to list such matters after the manner of stock reports, the pages of the daily papers in these days, suggestive of approaching spring, would contain two quotations something like these: "Millinery active," "Audubons aggressive."

During the cold winter months just passed, while its bird friends were in the South, the Illinois Audubon Society has been working to the end that the women who will flock to the "spring millinery openings" already heralded shall with resolute faces pass by the dainty feather-decked creations, and purchase only those which are flower-crowned or ribbon-decked. The directors of the bird protective society have issued within a day or two a pamphlet compiled by William Dutcher, treasurer of the American Ornithologists' Union. It will be sent to all the farmers' institutes, and to individual husbandmen by the hundreds, for the society believes, after having tried many means of teaching the bird-preservation lesson, that the best way to get at the milliners and the women is through the agriculturists. The more enthusiastic Audubonites declare that when the farmers read Mr. Dutcher's leaflet they will rise in mass and demand that bird killing for millinery or any other purpose be stopped. The husbandmen have a yearly crop interest of nearly three billion dollars. The total capital invested in the millinery trade is only twenty-five millions. Mr. Dutcher says that agriculture loses two hundred million every year because of the attacks of injurious insects. As the birds diminish in number, the loss increases, a fact which he declares is proved beyond a peradventure. A difference of only one per cent in the value of the farm products means a loss equal to the value of the millinery trade of the country. As a matter of fact, the farmer is the man who is paying the greater part of the millinery bills of the land.

The Audubon Society, after three years of active work, has come to the conclusion that appeals to the sympathies, and the humane feelings of men and women, are not so potent as are plain statements of facts which show how the pocketbook is touched.