r the continental
press is so well muzzled that when it bites its teeth merely meet in
the empty atmosphere with a discreet snap.

But to the Yankee nothing excepting the Monroe Doctrine is sacred, and
the unsopped watch-dogs of the press bite right and left, unmuzzled.
The biter bites--it is his profession--and that ends the affair; the
bitee is bitten, and, in the deplorable argot of the hour, "it is up
to him."

So now that the scandal has been well aired and hung out to dry in the
teeth of decency and the four winds, and as all the details have been
cheerfully and grossly exaggerated, it is, perhaps, the proper moment
for the truth to be written by the only person whose knowledge of all
the facts in the affair entitles him to speak for himself as well as
for those honorable ladies and gentlemen whose names and titles have
been so mercilessly criticised.

These, then, are the simple facts:

The International Scientific Congress, now adjourned _sine die_, met
at nine o'clock in the morning, May 3, 1900, in the Tasmanian Pavilion
of the Paris Exposition. There were present the most famous scientists
of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Switzerland, and the
United States.

His Royal Highness the Crown-Prince of Monaco presided.

It is not necessary, now, to repeat the details of that preliminary
meeting. It is sufficient to say that committees representing the
various known sciences were named and appointed by the Prince of
Monaco, who had been unanimously elected permanent chairman of the
conference. It is the composition of a single committee that concerns
us now, and that committee, representing the science which treats of
bird life, was made up as follows:

Chairman--His Royal Highness the Crown-Prince of Monaco. Members--Sir
Peter Grebe, Great Britain; Baron de Becasse, France; his Royal
Highness King Christian, of Finland; the Countess d'Alzette, of
Belgium; and I, from the United States, representing the Smithsonian
Institution and the Bronx Park Zoological Society of New York.

This, then, was the composition of that now notorious ornithological
committee, a modest, earnest, self-effacing little band of workers,
bound together--in the beginning--by those ties of mutual respect and
esteem which unite all laborers in the vineyard of science.

From the first meeting of our committee, science, the great leveller,
left no artificial barriers of rank or title standing between us. We
were enthu