INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 17 
does attack grain, but which protects it still more, the pilferer, 
the outlaw, loaded with abuse and smitten with curses—it has 
been found in Hungary that they were likely to perish without 
him, that he alone could sustain the mighty war against the 
beetles and the thousand winged enemies that swarm in the 
lowlands ; they have revoked the decree of banishment, re- 
called in haste this valiant militia, which, though deficient in 
discipline, is nevertheless the salvation of the country.* 
“Not long since, in the neighborhood of Rouen and in the 
valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. 
The beetles profited well by this proscription ; their larva, in- 
finitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with 
such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of 
which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root was con- 
sumed, and the whole grassy mantle, easily loosened, might 
have been rolled up and carried away like a carpet.” 
The general hostility of the European populace to the smaller 
birds is, in part, the remote effect of the reaction created by 
the game laws. When the restrictions imposed upon the chase 
by those laws were suddenly removed in France, the whole 
people at once commenced a destructive campaign against every 
species of wild animal. Arthur Young, writing in Provence, 
on the 380th of August, 1759, soon after the National Assembly 
had declared the chase free, thus complains of the annoyance 
he experienced from the use made by the peasantry of their 
newly-won liberty. “One would think that every rusty fire- 
lock in all Provence was at work in the indiscriminate destruc- 
tion of all the birds. The wadding buzzed by my ears, or fell 
* Apropos of the sparrow—a single pair of which, according to Michelet, 
p- 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpillars or 
coleoptera in a week—I find in an English newspaper a report of a meeting of 
a ‘* Sparrow Club,” stating that the member who took the first prize had de- 
stroyed 1,467 of these birds within the year, and that the prowess of the 
other members had brought the total number up to 11,944 birds, besides 2,556 
eggs. Every one of the fourteen thousand hatched and unhatched birds, 
thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved his 
bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain. 
