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place this under the essentially beneficial is as unwarranted as to 
place all insects under that of harmful. While an effort is made 
.in the last to distinguish between the two this has not been to any 
considerable extent in the former. : 
After some personal practical experience and a more or less 
critical review of the facts now fairly numerous and common, I 
am constrained to submit that the showing under this method, 
while generally not appealed to as discrediting birds as economic 
factors, is yet incorrectly placed too often on the wrong side of 
the balance sheet, at least in part. 
Another factor apparently overlooked, or left out of consid- 
eration in these estimates is that of the enormous capacity for 
multiplication through propagation shown by most of the so- 
called ‘ injurious ”’ elements. 
When, for example, a May beetle has been estimated on the 
same quantitative basis as a May cherry, what account has been 
made for the gorged ovaries of the former which only awaited 
favorable conditions for oviposition? None whatver. And what 
is presumptively true in this case is demonstrably true in innum- 
erable other instances. ‘To cite a single case of recent observation 
in our immediate vicinity, the females of the periodic Cicada were 
so closely captured by insectivorous birds as to greatly lesson the 
damage done to shrubs and trees through ovipositing, to say 
nothing of subsequent injuries of larvae, or a subsequent genera- 
tion of adults. 
The same principle holds for a large proportion of noxious 
insects. For it must not be overlooked that the season of greatest 
activity among destructive and ovipositing insects is likewise that 
of corresponding activity among insectivorous birds. This must 
be true in the nature of the case, the latter depending largely upon 
the former. 
I am aware that these reflections are applicable alike to bene- 
ficial as to injurious insects. An insect-feeding bird is no respec- 
tor of persons on economic or ethical grounds. But by so much as 
the beneficial insects are in marked minority, will the objection be 
invalidated. 
Again, not a few of the pedacious insects are, like the birds, 
