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accomplish this. Secing there is such a primroses, and other garden plants, by consensus of opinion on the part of the plucking the blossoms or tearing them to agriculturists and horticulturists of at pieces, apparently out of wanton mischief. least half the inhabited world with regard 4. It is charged with driving martins to the mischievous and destructive nature from their nests, and so expelling strictly of sparrows, the feeble voices of bird-lov-insectivorous birds from districts in which ers and humanitarians, who urge that they should be allowed to increase and multiply at their will and pleasure, will hardly be listened to.

III.

FOR THE DEFENCE.

BY REV. THEODORE WOOD,
Author of "Our Bird Allies," "Our Insect
Allies," etc., etc.

their services are especially valuable.

Besides these, there are one or two minor counts of no practical importance.

This indictment appears sufficiently formidable. But the case for the defence must be set against it, and this consists of three contentions.

1. That some of the above accusations are greatly exaggerated.

2. That others are totally untrue.

3. That the undeniable mischief, large as it is, of which the sparrow is at times the cause, is more than counterbalanced by the services rendered by the bird in other ways.

Let us examine these three contentions in turn.

IF among the feathered inhabitants of our islands there be a bird with a bad character, that bird is most undoubtedly the common house-sparrow. From all quarters there rises up a chorus of execration against it. Farmers and garden- Taking the average price of wheat at ers unite in abusing it. They accuse it of 30s. per quarter, Mr. Bell's estimate renumberless crimes. They regard it as a quires us to believe that 1,392,904 quarters monster of iniquity. They freely advo- of this grain alone, or 313,404 tons, are cate its partial or even complete extermi-annually swallowed by English sparrows. nation. And by organized as well as by individual efforts that policy has been largely carried into effect. We hear of Sparrow Clubs which pay so much per head for the birds themselves, and so much per dozen for their eggs. We read of farmers who scatter poisoned grain in severe weather-a sort of refinement of cruelty with the result of destroying not sparrows alone, but numbers of other small birds with them. We all know the fruit-grower who cannot believe that his garden or his orchard is in safety unless it is incessantly promenaded by a man with a gun. And still the cry is for further slaughter. Is this slaughter necessary?

In order to answer that question, we must glance for a moment at the various counts upon which the sparrow is arraigned.

I. It is accused of stealing corn, alike from the field, the rick, and the poultry yard; and a well-known Cheshire agriculturist Mr. Bell - has lately estimated the annual loss of wheat due to the attacks of sparrows in England alone at £2,089,353.

2. It is further accused of shelling-out growing peas from their pods, and in many cases even of destroying the plants themselves almost immediately upon their appearance above the ground.

3. It is also said to damage crocuses,

In other words, these birds dispose of nearly one-sixth of all the wheat grown in England. Prodigious! The statement is absurd on the face of it. Probably Mr. Bell, like many farmers before him, has based his calculations upon the amount of damage wrought in one particular fielda damage which is often very great, and also most deceptive. For sparrows are by no means equally distributed over all parts of our corn-growing districts. They congregate near trees or houses, or in such other spots as may be convenient for nesting and shelter, and never travel far afield in search of food; so that their mischief is concentrated upon a comparatively small area of ground. Thus certain fields in the neighborhood of trees or buildings may be systematically robbed of a large proportion of their produce, while others, at a little distance, as invariably escape. Clearly, then, it is misleading and unfair to take a particular field as a sample, and to build up a startling array of figures upon the exceptional basis which it affords.

Much of the evidence against the sparrow on this particular count, again, has been furnished by the examination of the crops of slaughtered specimens. This evidence, at first sight, may seem unexceptionable; but it is weak and deficient in this respect, that although it may establish "1 that sparrows feed largely

upon corn, it altogether fails to show where that corn comes from. Now, a sparrow may frequently obtain a hearty meal of corn without robbing the farmer or the poultry-keeper at all. At harvest time, for instance, and during the gleaning season which succeeds it, a large quantity of grain lies scattered upon the ground, perfectly useless to the farmer, quite beyond the power even of the gleaners to gather up. In devouring this grain the bird is performing not a mischievous but a positively beneficial act, since if allowed to remain it would shortly sprout, and tend to exhaust the land. Yet, if a sparrow, having feasted upon such grain, be shot and opened, the contents of his crop are brought forward as undeniable evidence that he has been robbing the farmer!

Sparrows extract a considerable amount of grain, too, from horse-droppings; and they also devour no small quantity which has been brought out from the ricks, not by the birds themselves, but by rats. So that even though sparrow after sparrow may be examined, and found to contain grain, it by no means follows that that grain has been stolen from the farmer.

On the count of destroying garden flowers, the sparrow must plead guilty. It is a crime of comparatively modern development, and seems to have originated in the desire to obtain certain small insects which tenant the flowers in question.

The accusation of stealing peas and destroying the plants may be met by a flat denial.

Farmers and gardeners commonly attribute the chipped leaves of young bean and pea plants to the beak of the sparrow. In reality, however, the injury is due, not to the bird at all, but to the small Sitones weevils, which are so terribly destructive to many leguminous plants. This may readily be proved by experiment. On a warm spring evening, let the investigator examine a few rows of young peas or beans by the aid of a bull's-eye lantern. He will find the edges of the leaves thronged by these little beetles, all busily feeding upon them. Now let him remove the insects from a leaf or two, and he will see that the margins are chipped away, even down to the midrib, in exactly the manner attributed to the beak of the spar

row.

But it will be objected that sparrows visit pea and bean fields in multitudes. No doubt they do; but they go for the sake, not of the plants themselves, but of the weevils which are attacking and destroying them. So that their errand, in

reality, far from being of a mischievous character, is a highly beneficial one.

Some five years since I had a remarkable illustration of this fact. In my own garden, near Broadstairs, were several long rows of "telephone peas. Of all the garden owners of the neighborhood, I alone took no pains to prevent the visits of sparrows, which were allowed free and undisturbed access to every part of the garden, and took the fullest advantage of their opportunities. On visiting the rows, indeed, I frequently disturbed a flock of twenty or thirty sparrows from among them. Yet I lost neither a plant nor a pod, while none of my neighbors succeeded in growing a crop of even average yield. The fact was that the Sitones weevils were unusually abundant in that season, and that the sparrows had removed them from my rows, while in those of my neighbors, from which the birds were excluded, the insects were able to carry on their mischievous operations unchecked.

In order to put this matter quite beyond dispute, I killed half-a-dozen of the birds and opened them. In five out of the six the crop contained a number of the dead weevils, while in the gizzard were vestiges of others. In none of these was there anything of a vegetable character. In the crop of the sixth, which had apparently but just arrived, was a single grain of corn, probably extracted the month being May - from some horse-droppings in the neighborhood.

Against the great amount of mischief which is undoubtedly committed by the sparrow, must be set the very great services which it renders by the destruction of mischievous insects.

This is notably the case during the breeding season, which extends over a period of some ten weeks. The young sparrows are quite unable to digest a vegetable diet, and are fed entirely upon insects. Actual experiment has shown that these consisting for the most part of highly injurious grubs are brought to the nest at the rate of forty per hour. Assuming that the sparrow works for only twelve hours in the day an estimate far below the mark - we still have a total of 480 insects per day, 3,360 per week, and 33,600 in the course of the breeding season destroyed by each pair of birds! And this calculation does not take into account those which are devoured by the parent birds themselves. Of the value of the sparrow as a grub destroyer I have again had practical experience. There is a large kitchen and fruit garden in North

Kent in which sparrows are not only tolerated, but encouraged. The walls of the house and stabling are covered with ivy and creepers, in which they nest in hundreds. The garden, however, is bordered on two sides by an extensive orchard, devoted partly to apple-trees and partly to gooseberries and currants, which are also grown largely in the kitchen garden. And throughout the spring and summer that orchard is patrolled by gunners, with instructions to shoot every sparrow that they

see.

Now on the doctrine accepted by farmers, the orchard ought to bear plentifully, while the kitchen garden should be stripped of its produce. But, as a matter of fact, the exact opposite is regularly the case. The gooseberry and currant bushes are stripped of their foliage by saw fly and currant moth grubs and caterpillars, while the apple-trees are similarly damaged by the larvæ of the lackey moth, and the fruit return is hardly ever sufficient to cover working expenses.

get rid of them. The increase of insects is said by the farmers to be due to the scarcity of sparrows, owing to the wholesale slaughter of the birds which has been carried on in the district."

The terrible havoc wrought by sparrows in Australia and North America, often brought forward as an argument for the extermination of the bird, has no bearing upon the "sparrow question "in Great Britain. The bird in those countries has been introduced by man, and change of climate implies a corresponding change of food. The sparrow as a British bird, on every principle of justice, must be judged by its doings in Great Britain alone. And weighing its services as a whole against its mischief, similarly considered, the unprejudiced observer can hardly deny that the former largely predominate.

IV.

IN AMERICA.

BY G. W. MURDOCH,
Late Editor of the Farmer.

EXACTLY forty years ago what is properly termed the "English sparrow" (Passer domesticus) was introduced into the United States of America as an ornithological experiment. From the Pacific to the Atlantic the great problem now is how to exterminate the bird. Under what circumstances and through the agency of what courses has such a revolution in public opinion taken place with regard to the habits of one of the most familiar birds in existence? We use the word familiar advisedly, for wherever man congregates in families, tribes, or communities, there will be found the sparrow living and thriving, impudently audacious and quite familiar to an almost irritating degree. The sparrow has never been a much valued bird. It is not of handsome plumage. He has no compensating at

But in the kitchen garden matters are very different. The gooseberry and currant bushes are literally laden with fruit. More than half a ton of jam is annually made from the produce of the latter alone, puddings, etc., for a school of thirty boys are manufactured three or four times a week, a large quantity of fruit is given away, and yet at the end of the season a considerable amount invariably remains ungathered. So, too, with the gooseberries, while the lackey caterpillar is almost unknown upon the apples. Surely this may be regarded as a practical commentary upon the value of the sparrow as an insect destroyer. I may further refer to the fact that in Maine and Auxerre, some five-and-thirty years since, sparrows were wholly exterminated in accordance with government edict. In the following season even the foliage of the trees was almost wholly destroyed by caterpillars. Per-tractions as a musician, and there is not haps, too, I may be permitted to quote the following, which appeared two years since in the Kentish newspapers, and carries with it great weight owing to the source from which the main statement emanates. I looked for some weeks for a contradiction, which, however, never appeared:

"An almost unprecedented attack of maggot has taken place in the Kentish fruit plantations, and nut and apple crops have been in many instances grievously damaged if not destroyed. Planters are making vigorous efforts to fight the pest; but the grubs are so numerous that hitherto they have defeated all attempts to

much in him as a bird for the pie-dish. In Scriptural days of old it was asked, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings?" thereby implying that the bird was of trifling money value. It is true that we find the Psalmist saying, "I watch and am as a sparrow that sitteth alone upon the housetop," but the bird to which the repentant king compared himself was not our familiar Passer domesticus, but a thrush or Passer solitarius, a very differ ent kind of bird. But even before 1850, when the first common sparrow was transported or rather carried to America, the character of the bird as a friend or foe of

the farmer and the gardener was in ques- | the sparrow have not at all times differention. The verdict against him was of the tiated between the two classes in their Scotch judicial order, "not proven," and inductions. Important evidence on the a good many are still of opinion that the subject was taken by the Wild Birds Proverdict should remain standing, while a tection Committee of the British House few regard the bird as a pest, and on the of Commons in 1873. Some of the facts other hand not a few as a blessing. therein, even in detail, are certainly of a most important character as bearing on the good character of the sparrow.

Let us glance for a moment at the experience of the United States during the forty years the birds have bred and extended themselves. The story has been admirably told in a report just issued from the Ornithological Section of the Agricultural Department at Washington. It con sists of over four hundred closely printed pages, and relates to an enormous mass of direct evidence as to the habits of the birds, and is therefore an invaluable, and, as far as it goes, valuable basis for inductive generalization. In the first place we notice the remarkable adaptability of the sparrow to all conditions of human life. Wherever man migrated and settled, there went the sparrow and thrived. The bird is at home in the scorching southern states, and he can make himself quite comfortable in the extreme north-west.

"The marvellous rapidity," says Mr. Merriman, the eminent American ornithologist, "of the sparrow's multiplication, the surprising swiftness of its extension, and the prodigious size of the area it overspreads, are without parallel in the history of any bird." The facts in support of this statement are overwhelming, and need not be recapitulated. Just a few words here about the phenomenal fecundity of the sparrow. "It is not unusual," adds Mr. Merriman, "for a single pair in the latitude of New York, or further south, to rear between twenty and thirty young in the course of a year." Assuming the annual produce of a pair to be twenty-four young, of which half are females and half males, and assuming further for the sake of compilation that all live together with their offspring, it will be seen that in ten years the progeny of a single pair would be 275,716,983,698. But for practical purposes if we allow three years as the maximum of a sparrow's life, and allowing twenty as a maximum of annual births for each pair, the fecundity is enormous. Now it has been stoutly argued by the "friends of sparrows" that at least during breeding time they feed their young on insects, in most cases on injurious insects, and as a consequence they do incalculably more good in that way than evil by the destruction of ripening or ripe grain. Of course there are useful and in fact beneficent insects, and the aforesaid friends of

For instance, Mr. Henry Myers, one of the largest market gardeners in the neighborhood of London, was examined with the following result:

"I believe you were led at one time of your life to reconsider your opinions about birds? I suppose I have been in my time one of the greatest of sparrow destroyers. You have the blood of a great many sparrows on your head?- I had a sparrow club at one time; I thought they were injurious birds. We killed them until scarcely one could be found on the premises. Did you derive valuable results from that course?- No; on the contrary, we were eaten up with blight. Will you be kind enough to tell the committee what was your experience after so destroying the sparrows? After the sparrows became almost extinct we found blight of various kinds very much increase upon us, and it has done so ever since. I am glad to say sparrows are becoming more common with us now; this year our trees are comparatively free from blight. The committee will draw their own inference, but those were the facts. As the birds have increased you have suffered much less from insects, you say? - Yes, especially this year. Are you in the way of noticing the habits of the sparrows when they are in your garden? To say that the sparrows do no damage would be wrong, but there is no doubt that they do a larger proportion of good than they do harm."

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you protect the birds or not? I certainly would, because I would rather lose some fruit than have the whole of the crops destroyed by insects and caterpillars. You think the greatest danger is on the side of the insect than the bird? - Yes, undoubtedly. They come in shoals; you may manage the insects in a very small garden, but you cannot manage them in an acre or two of fruit trees. It is within your experience that where birds are encouraged insects are kept down?-I always find that we never have insects to an extent to damage the crops seriously where there are plenty of birds."

Mr. Merriman, in his report, has not scrupled to quote largely from the above, his sole object being to get at "the bottom facts" relating to the habits of sparrows. Summing up the vast amount of evidence taken all over the United States, the following are the general conclusions. With regard to injury to buds, blossoms, etc., 584 reports were sent in; of these 265 alleged positive damage of varying kind and degree, 12 were indeterminate, and the remaining 307 were favorable to the bird. The compiler, however, points out that the greater part of the favorable reports (294) have little weight, being brief monosyllabic negatives written in reply to the schedule questions, without anything to indicate the extent or closeness of the writers' observation. Almost all reports agree that considerable injury is done by the filthy habits of sparrows about houses, and where there are ornamental trees. Grapes are grown extensively in the open in America, and the evidence is clear that sparrows are beginning to find out the value of this fruit, and consume it greedily. It is also credited with much damage to apples and other kinds of fruit, the young seeds of many kinds of green vegetables, plants, etc. The most valuable portion of the report, however, refers to the elaborate facts to be found in the tables of food as shown by dissections of stomachs. In all and from every part of the country, and at all seasons of the year, 636 stomachs of sparrows were examined minutely, many of them within an hour and a half after death. The net result was that wheat was found in 22 stomachs; oats in 327; corn (maize) in 71; fruit seeds in 57; grass seeds in 102; weed seeds in 85; undetermined vegetable matter in 219; bread, rice, etc., 19; noxious insects, 47; beneficial insects, 50; insects of no economical importance in 51. Having these hard facts before us, the general verdict against the sparrow must be rather decisive, and that

too without taking into account its impudent and most disastrous interference with the breeding of other and undoubtedly beneficent birds, such as martins, etc.

From Longman's Magazine. THE LINGUIST.

"HERE he is!" I said, as I heard the cab-wheels at the door. "Poor devil, I wonder how he will like Collingwood College!"

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Our French master shrugged his shoulders. "As the rest of us. It is not there the question. How will we like him?" We were sitting in the dog-hutch — or masters' study our only refuge from our flock a dark, unwholesome, underground room that ever smelt of tea-leaves and black-beetles. The French master had his thumb in a yellow-covered novel as usual. As usual, too, the German master was busy with grammar and dictionary. The candles in their bent, japanned candlesticks lighted the room ill, but one hardly desired a light that should show more of it.

"The new master, sir," said the overgrown boy in buttons who opened the door and looked after the master's wife's pony. Then he came in. He was tall, very tall; he had a fair, round face, and chubby hands, and a pair of very round, innocentlooking blue eyes. Altogether, he was so like a large-sized child that his perfect self-possession came as a shock to one.

“First-rate, thank you," he said in answer to the "how-d'ye-do" with which I greeted him. "What a rummy little den you've got here! D'ye know, it is just a chance that I'm here as English master; I was nearly taking a berth as French master at Blackheath."

Our French master looked up from his novel and said something courteous in his own tongue. The new man answered him. I don't pretend to know anything about French, so I will only say that they didn't seem to be talking the same language. Then our German master roused himself: "You speak also German?" he asked.

"Sir," answered the junior master, "I speak all modern languages except Russian, which is not a civilized tongue. I am a linguist; that is my strong point." He laughed, and gaily dashed into a German phrase.

Our German master followed him, and our French master found him more amus

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