A CHAIR OF ECONOMIC ORNITHOLOGY 129 



bulk of its elements from species which on every ground 

 merit protection and not death. 



Moreover, the policy of enlisting school children in a 

 general campaign of nest destruction is one at which every 

 sentiment of humanity revolts in horror. For years, the 

 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and numberless 

 individual sympathisers with its aims, have striven to show 

 the children of our country the delights of nest protection, 

 and the futility, to use no stronger term, of tearing down 

 every nest the minute it is descried. The success in my 

 own district has been marked and gratifying. But if boys 

 are now to be encouraged and actually paid to destroy eggs 

 and young of " Sparrows," or what are to pass as such, all 

 this work will be undone in a day. Whatever the private 

 knowledge of the boys may be, what local dispenser of blood 

 money is likely to be a man capable of telling the unfeathered 

 young of a Sparrow from that of any other species of Finch ? 

 It would almost seem that the whole scheme is one for the 

 calculated promotion of cruelty by children, in combination 

 with the encouragement of fraud. u Fas est et ab hostc 

 docert," it is true ; are we therefore to take lessons also in 

 " frightfulness " from our foes? 



But even Sparrows are not as black as they are painted. 

 Dr Collinge has shown from the systematic examination of 

 nearly 300 Sparrows, the majority of which were killed in a 

 fruit-growing district, that the great bulk of the food carried 

 to the nestling young consists of weevils, and the larvae and 

 grubs of noxious insects, which if not destroyed would at 

 least do incalculable harm to fruit and land crops {Journal 

 of the Board of Agriculture, vol. xxi., October 1914). It is 

 the writer's opinion that a great reduction in the number of 

 Sparrows would be wholly beneficial, for the good done by 

 the present excess of Sparrows, great as it is, might be 

 competently accomplished by other birds in every way more 

 meritorious ; but the danger is that it is just these very birds 

 which will be the chief sufferers at the hands of the Sparrow 

 Clubs, while the Sparrows themselves in great measure 

 escape. 



The Pheasant has long been known to those who are 

 66 R 



