INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 



ligion. As an instance, the late Mr Seebohm, whose four 



volumes are the delight of all who care to read about 



our birds, owns in one place to having robbed in one day 



upwards of 450 egg.i, (not, be it remarked, in 

 By collectors. , , • i i \ • i t 1 c 



these islands), including nearly 150 of one 



species and over 80 of another. In another account he 

 mentions 250 eggs of the lesser tern as the gleaning of one 

 week. After these confessions, it is surely intended for 

 humour when he complains at yet another i^age of the 

 "hard-hearted" peasants of Siberia, who habitually take 

 quantities of these eggs for food. Worse than all these is 

 the wanton pot-hunter, who, without any rational interest 

 in game, crops, or science, loafs abroad at all times and 

 blazes at any oriole, hawk, or other bird that may chance 

 to cross his path. Boys are among the worst offenders, 

 and it is not without regret that one finds the editor 

 of an excellent school magazine delivering himself thus : 

 " School arrangements may limit them, irate farmers 

 and keepers may rage, and Acts of Parliament thunder, 

 but eggs and bugs will still be sought and acquired 

 wherever there be boys." That our four-footed animals 

 have not by such means been long since reduced to the 

 level of those of Xew Zealand, that our song-birds are not 

 as scarce as on the great plains of Italy, ^ is owing less to 

 any measures taken for their protection than to the sacred 

 rights of ownership in land, against which the lover of 

 nature is not likely, whatever his politics, to raise his voice. 

 But the museum-men ! As Ruskin says of the birds : " One 

 kills them, the other writes classifying epitaphs." 



As above remarked, however, it is by less direct means 

 that our mammalian and bird fauna has become gradually 

 impoverished, not alone in variety, but rather in actual num- 

 bers. Here and there, i)erhaps, the keeper's gun may have 

 told. We learn, for instance, that in parts of the North 



1 In the ' Times ' of July 10 of tlie present year (1897) appeared a 

 letter from a lady deploring the well-known spoliation of Italian wild 

 birds for the London table ! 



