40 . State Horticultural Society. 



tect the birds, and the birds will protect your fields and your or- 

 chards. Allow no gun to be fired on your place. Let the birds 

 know they are safe there. If officers do not enforce the law, 

 enforce the law against them. If they do not protect you against 

 injury, vote against them at the next election; whatever party you 

 or they may act with, your property, your fruit or grain is worth 

 more to you than your vote for an inefficient man. If no guns 

 were fired at birds in Missouri, the seventy species which the State 

 has lost would gradually return, and the loving songs, beauteous 

 plumage, lively chirping and gay flitting from bough to bough 

 would make your heart bound with joy, and blessings would come 

 to us from Him who doth all things well. 



Missouri has lost seventy species of birds — seventy species. 

 It is putting it low to say there were one thousand birds to each ; 

 that is, seventy thousand birds. Where are they? When a bird 

 flies through the air it leaves no trace. They may be in Illinois, in 

 Arkansas, in Kentucky; or the murderous gun may have killed 

 them. 



And we have to use sprays and poisons, or otherwise have 

 no fruit; and spray even to save the leaves, which make the trees 

 beautiful and give us shade and beauty. Sprays are expensive and 

 troublesome. Birds would fill our trees for worms each year, if 

 we did not kill them ; thus we would have fruit and shade and beau- 

 ty, with no expense, if we did not kill the birds. Massachusetts 

 spends from seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand dollars 

 each year to keep the worms of the gypsy moth from eating the 

 leaves from off the elm trees, but the gypsy moth lives on and lays 

 its eggs, and the worms revel amongst the leaves of the grand old 

 elms ; and what was a beauty, a glory and a pride, bending gently 

 to the soft summer air, sending forth its sweet, murmuring music 

 on the wind, is become like the harsh notes of winter. 



How can we bring these seventy thousand birds back? Aye, 

 there is the rub. The forest that used to be a pleasant home for 

 the birds, where they could raise their young in safety, have been 

 largely cut down. To the birds, with all their gaiety, sprightliness 

 and twitter and joy, they give love and safety. 



A hunter friend of mine told me that at the first crack of a 

 gun all the birds within its sound fly away to some farm that had 

 posted on it, "No guns allowed to be fired on my place." So let 

 every farm in the State be posted. This is a big job ; yes, but we 

 have over three millions of people to do it, and then it is much less 

 work than for each man to spray. Gradually, a few ^t a time, the 



