106 THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 
the average yearly progeny of a pair of sparrows 
amounts to fourteen, goes on to say: “It is surprising 
that farmers should be so little interested on this matter ; 
surely they cannot be aware that the little feathered 
tribe claim a tithe of their land’s produce. The daily 
consumption of small birds is compyted to be, in weight, 
one-sixth of their own bodies, and allowing the average 
weight of sparrows to be one ounce avoirdupois” 
(which, by-the-bye, is too high), “the consumption 
of 100 would be 6083 oz. or nearly 34 cwt. for 
the year. Supposing, further, that every hundred 
acres of Jand contained 1000 sparrows, their yearly con- 
sumption would be, according to the preceding theory, 
60,830 oz., or nearly 343 cwt.” 
Now, undoubtedly, the consumption of this quantity 
of wheat or other corn would indeed bea serious matter, 
and if corn was the exclusive food of the sparrow, then 
something might be said in favour of his destruction. 
But we must not condemn him without hearing his own 
witnesses as well as those of bis enemies. In the 
Zoologist, page 2349, Mr. Hawley of Doncaster writes 
that he has repeatedly watched sparrows feeding their 
young, and has found that on the average they bring 
food to the nest once in ten minutes for six hours out 
of the twenty-four, each time bringing from two to six 
caterpillars. He goes on to say, “Now suppose the 
‘three thousand five hundred sparrows’” (alluding to 
an association which had destroyed that number in a 
year), “were to have been alive the next spring, each 
pair to have built a nest, and reared successive broods of 
young during three months, we have, at the rate of 
252,000 per day, the enormous multitude of 21,168,000 
larve prevented from destroying the products of the 
