232 Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, ^c. 



of those journals cannot be expected to have that special know- 

 ledge which alone would enable them to detect the fallacies of 

 which many of their correspondents; well-meaning though they 

 be^ are guilty. And if such a man has the ear of an influential 

 journal, and gets his remonstrance inserted in its columns, 

 however inconclusive the arguments he brings forward may be, it 

 only serves to exclude any further and, perhaps, better-reasoned 

 communication on the topic. But I have especially to lament, 

 as Mr. Gould, in his ' Birds of Great Britain,^ has done before me, 

 that the Acclimatization Society established among us did not use 

 its influence to restrain the destruction of the Sand-Grouse. 

 Volunteers for naturalization as they were, they had a peculiar 

 claim on its sympathies. Yet, instead of taking any step in that 

 direction, this body confined itself to discussing at its annual 

 dinner the merits of the species as an article of food — merits on 

 which a score at least of the officers engaged in the late Chinese 

 war were already able to pronounce. Had the Society exerted itself 

 in the manner that might have been expected of it, my map 

 would probably not have presented the dismal array of names 

 which fringes the eastern shore of our island, and my readers 

 would have been spared much pain in conning over the blood- 

 stained roll which records the second irruption of Syrrhaptes 

 paradoxus into England. 



Magdalene College, Cambridge, March 1864. 



XVII. — Letters, Extracts from Correspondence, Notices, S^c. 

 We have received the following letters addressed " To the 



Editor":— 



5 Peel Terrace, Brighton, November 24, 1863. 



Sir, — On the 19th September, as a man was watching his 



nets, near " the Dyke," the highest ground on these downs, a 



mentioning that a gentleman had shot an example of Syrrkaptes in the 

 beginning of that month. Now, considering the season of the year, the 

 death of that one bird could have no appreciable effect on the species at 

 large ; I therefore consider blame in this case to have been somewhat un- 

 necessarily applied, the more so since the person in question showed that 

 he turned the specimen to good account by the intelligent notice he pub- 

 lished respecting it. Had the like sarcastic remarks been made some 

 months earlier, good might have followed. These were much too late. 



