1892-93-] Fibre Balls. 55 



dealer in London lately got an order for 32,000 dead hum- 

 ming-birds. In Europe the same slaughter goes on. The 

 swallow is the friend of man. But for it, hosts of flies 

 and midges would in summer make life hardly endurable 

 in the country. Yet swallows are destroyed in myriads 

 in France by means of electricity. Wires are put up, on 

 which they alight to rest, after their long flight across the 

 sea from Africa, and while they are resting electric currents 

 are sent along the wires. The wagtails living on snails are 

 the saviours of our sheep, which, but for these birds, might 

 be altogether destroyed by liver-fluke. Yet wagtails are 

 destroyed for the sake of a whim of fashion. In America 

 the red-headed woodpecker has been almost entirely extir- 

 pated : the result has been, that whole forests have been 

 destroyed by a small bug, on which the red-headed wood- 

 pecker fed. 



Many more illustrations might be given, but really all I 

 want to do is to urge ladies to be merciful, and adorn their 

 hats and bonnets with flowers and ferns, not with murdered 

 animals, and especially not with murdered birds. Every lady 

 who never wears a bird or a bird's feather in her bonnet is a 

 practical member of the Society for the Protection of Birds ; 

 but ladies who desire cards of membership have to pay for 

 them the sum of twopence. The Hon. Secretary is Miss H. 

 Poland, 29 "Warwick Eoad, Maida Hill, London; the local 

 secretary, Mrs Murray, 17 Cumin Place, Edinburgh. 



III.— FIBRE BALLS. 



By T. B. SPRAGUE, M.A., LL.D., &c, President. 



{Read Dec. 23, 1892.) 



The President exhibited specimens of five kinds of fibre 

 balls :— 



1. Algoicl halls from Loch Kildonan, South Uist. — These are 

 of a dark-green colour, and of various sizes, most of them being 



