INTRODUCTION OF BIRDS. 119 
Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility 
of accommodation,* and they are more severely affected by 
tations are called ragnaje, and the reader will find, in Bindi’s edition of Da- 
vanzati, a very pleasant description of a ragnaja, though its authorship is not 
now ascribed to that eminent writer. 
Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Be- 
deutung der Vogel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and 
the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, 
but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are 
useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of 
this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the 
burrows of the moles are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the 
dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square 
miles of land under water. See Annales des Ponts et Chaussées, 1847, 
1ere sémestre, p. 150; Voar, Wiitzliche und schddliche Thiere ; and particu- 
larly articles in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 
16. 
See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 797, an article entitled Nutzen der 
Voge fiir die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that ‘‘ without birds no 
agriculture or even vegetation would be possible.” 
In an interesting memoir by Rondani, published in the Bollettino del Comizia 
agrario di Parma for December, 1868, it is maintained that birds are often 
injurious to the agriculturist, by preying not only on noxious insects, but 
sometimes exclusively, or at least by preference, on entomophagous tribes 
which would otherwise destroy those injurious to cultivated plants. See also 
articles by Prof. Sabbioni in the Giornale di Agricoltura di Bologna, Novem- 
ber and December, 1870, and other articles in the same journal of 15th and 
30th April, 1870. 
* Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of particular 
branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in the case of such 
changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly attached 
to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly 
the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish them- 
selves in the same breeding-places from year to year. The stork is astrong- 
winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. 
He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six 
pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the 
European shore of the narrow Bosphorus, while—much to the satisfaction of 
the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a 
bird—dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned 
with his nests, 
The appearance of the doye-like grouse, Tetrao paradoxus, or Syrrhaptes 
Pallasii, in various parts of Europe, in 1859 and the following years, is a 
