The strangest item of Mr. Seton’s story is yet to be told.  In 1890 Mr. Seton stocked his park at Cos Cob, Conn., with hares and rabbits from several widely separated localities.  In 1903, the plague came and swept them all away.  Mr. Seton sent specimens to the Zoological Park for examination by the Park veterinary surgeon, Dr. W. Reid Blair.  They were found to be infested by great numbers of a dangerous bloodsucking parasite known as Strongylus strigosus, which produces death by anemia and emaciation.  There were hundreds of those parasites in each animal.  I assisted in the examination, and was shown by Dr. Blair, under the microscope, that Strongylus puts forth eggs literally by hundreds of thousands!

The life history of that parasite is not well known, but it may easily develop that the cycle of its maximum destructiveness is seven years, and therefore it may be accountable for the seven-year plague among the hares and rabbits of the northern United States and Canada.

Possibly Strongylus strigosus is all that stands between Canada and a pest of rabbits like that of Australia.  Just why this parasite is inoperative in Australia, or why it has not been introduced there to lessen the rabbit evil, we do not know.  Mr. Seton declares that the rabbits of his park were “subject to all the ills of the flesh, except possibly writer’s paralysis and housemaid’s knee.”

PARASITIC INFECTION OF WILD DUCKS.—­The diseases of wild game, especially waterfowl, grouse and quail, have caused heavy losses in America as well as in European countries, and scientists have been carefully investigating the cause and the general nature of the maladies, as well as probable methods of prevention and cure.  Mr. Geo. Atkinson, a well-known practical naturalist of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, writes as follows to a local paper on this subject, which I find quoted in the National Sportsman: 

The question which has developed these important proportions during the past year is that of the extent of the parasitic infection of our wild ducks and other game, and the possibilities of the extended transmission of these parasites to domestic stock, or even humanity, by eating.

The parasites in question are contained in small elliptical cases found underlying the surface muscles of the breast, and in advanced cases extending deeper into the flesh and the muscular tissues of the legs and wings.  They are not noticeable in the ordinary process of plucking the bird for the table, and are not found internally, so that the only method of discovering their presence is by slitting the skin of the breast and paring it back a few inches when the worm-like sacs will be seen buried in the flesh.

These parasites have come to my notice periodically during the process of skinning birds for mounting during the past number of years, but it was only when they appeared in unusual numbers last