Old Statute

One-day last week two Harvard students, Oliver Brooks and Douglas H. Robinson, appeared at Cambridge's City Hall, lugging between them the fresh carcass of a seal. They said they had shot the seal in Marblehead Harbor, demanded $2 for killing it from the City Treasurer. When Treasurer William J. Shea wanted to know what it was all about, the students referred him to an old Massachusetts statute, passed in 1888. Treasurer Shea spent an hour hunting up the statute, found it, paid the $2. He also learned that the law required him to cut off and burn the seal's nose, as evidence a bounty had been paid. Descending to the basement, Shea carefully amputated the seal's nose, tossed it into the furnace. Then he billed the State for $2.50--$2 for the bounty, 50-c- for removing the nose.

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