716 



to its present deliciousness. The Suffolk swine, so perfect ia afl their 

 proportions, are of the same descent as the long-nosed, slab sided land 

 pike, so often seen in the highways, and which can never be fatted, 

 from the fact that the more you feed them the more they wear them- 

 selves down to skin and bone in the desperate voraciousness with which 

 they eat it. But nature sets bounds to this advancement, and while 

 rewarding to the utmost our endeavors towards improvement within 

 certain limits, seems then to fear that our exertions may relax as their 

 effects prove less noticeable, and just as we fancy a certain friyt or veg- 

 etable has attained perfection, some malady seizes upon it, and the cul- 

 tivator is compelled to go back again to first principles, and in a great 

 measure bfgin anew his work of improvement. 



The rapid increase of our insect enemies, is probably to a considera- 

 ble extent our own fault. Many of us wage incessant warfare upon the 

 very means provided by nature for their extermination. But for the 

 birds which Providence has created to keep the insect hordes in check, , 

 we should be utterly overrun by them, and they would creep into our 

 houses and upon our tables, and devour our food before our eyes, as the 

 plague of frogs did with the hard hearted Egyptians. Almost all the 

 birds of heaven are furnished with appetites which crave insect food, and 

 the number a single flycatcher or robin will destroy in the course of the 

 day is astonishing. They perch upon our fruit trees to watch for them, 

 they dart before our doors to catch them on the wing, and they follow 

 the plow to pick up the grubs in the furrow. The farmer has no 

 better friends than the birds — none who work so incessantly for him, 

 and whose support costs him so little. I do not now recollect a single 

 one of the smaller birds, except, possibly, the cedar or cheiry bird, that 

 could well be spared. That little pest is a perfect profligate in the cher- 

 ry tree, not only overloading his stomach with the ripe fruit, but pick- 

 ing into and destroying far more than he eats. The robin, too, devours 

 cherries, but the few he takes would but poorly pay him for protecting 

 the orchard from the countless insects upon wh'ch he feeds through the 

 year. The martins, the whole tribe of the thrushes, the flycatcher and 

 the woodpecker families, and almost all the rest, feed to a great extent 

 upon destructive or troublesome insects — and not only so, bui are our 

 only protection against them. 



