THE ENGLISH SPAKROW. 3II 



become acclimated. Between i860 and 1870 a veritable craze for im- 

 porting sparrows seemed to sweep over the land. !Many cities of the 

 east and middle west sent to England and Germany for large num- 

 bers of the birds, the city of Philadelphia importing a thousand at 

 one time, while many private citizens showed their public spirit by 

 importing them at their own expense or purchasing from bird 

 dealers and liberating them. 



The eminent English authority on birds. Prof. Xewton, says : 

 "The ornithologists of the United States had timely warning from 

 their English brethern to beware of this species, but some of them 

 persisted in allowing and even advocating its introduction, and the 

 birds" arrival was hailed in an ode by so distinguished a poet as 

 Bryant." 



That all our ornithologists and citi^^ens did not regard this 

 movement with favor was demonstratevi \jy the "sparrow war" that 

 was waged with great bitterness for a number of years. The contro- 

 versy hinged largely upon the food of the bird, its friends claiming 

 that it lived almost entirely on injurious insects and their lar\-ae, their 

 opponents holding that, as it belongs to a noted family of seed 

 eaters, it would not depart from their natural ways to any great 

 extent. 



^lany were the wise and wordy articles which appeared in the 

 public print, while the sparrows were increasing at a rate alarming 

 to their foes and, it is to be supposed, satisfactory to their friends. 

 In 1888 the Dept. of Agriculture made an investigation to find 

 whether the birds did more harm than good to agriculture. In the 

 report made to the government in 1889, Prof. Barrows said, "The 

 marvelous rapidity of the sparrows' multiplication, the surpassing 

 swiftness of its extension (having in one year, 1886, added 516,500 

 square miles to the territory occupied by it) and the prodigious 

 size of the area it has overspread are without parallel in the history 

 of any birds. Like a noxious weed transplanted to a fertile soil it 

 has taken root and become disseminated over half a continent before 

 the significance of its presence has come to be understood." An 

 idea of the possibilities of its increase is given by the calculation 

 that, provided the birds all lived and were in pairs, the progeny of 

 a single pair in ten years might amount to 275,716.983,698! In 

 the "Birds of North and Middle America" published in 1901, Robert 

 Ridg^vay says the sparrow is now "thoroughly and ineradically 

 naturalized in all settled districts except southern Florida and a few 

 extreme outposts." 



So it seems that this "imported European nuisance must be with 

 us always, and if there is no greater check put upon it in the next 



