118 INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 
into my carriage, five or six times in the course of the day.” 
* * The declaration of the Assembly that every man is 
free to hunt on his own land * * has filled all France with 
an intolerable cloud of sportsmen. * * The declaration 
speaks of compensations and indemnities [to the sedgneurs], 
but the ungovernable populace takes advantage of the abolition 
of the game laws and laughs at the obligation imposed by the 
decree.” 
The contagious influence of the French Revolution occa- 
sioned the removal of similar restrictions, with similar results, 
in other countries. The habits then formed have become here- 
ditary on the Continent, and though game laws still exist in 
England, there is little doubt that the blind prejudices of the 
ignorant and half-educated classes in that country against birds 
are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation, which, by 
restricting the chase of game worth killing, drives the un- 
privileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all 
wild life which is not reserved for the amusement of his betters. 
Hence the lord of the manor buys his partridges and his hares 
by sacrificing the bread of his tenants, and so long as the mem- 
bers of “ Sparrow Clubs” are forbidden to follow higher game, 
they will suicidally revenge themselves by destroying the birds 
which protect their wheatfields. 
On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative 
scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling 
I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive 
passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, 
containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes 
and other small birds are annually brought to market.* 
* SALVAGNOLI, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about 
Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a 
standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch 
from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down into the nets by 
throwing stones over them. 
In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with grove- 
like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors. These serve to 
collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plan- 
