UTILITY AND DESTEUCTION OF REPTILES. 123 



as that on the coasts of the North Sea, twenty thousand wild 

 ducks are usually taken in the course of the season in a single de- 

 coy, and sent to the large maritime towns for sale. The statistics 

 of the great European cities show a prodigious consumption of 

 game-birds, but the oflScial returns fall far below the truth, be 

 cause they do not include the rural districts, and because neither 

 the poacher nor his customers report the number of his victims. 

 Reproduction, in cultivated countries, can not keep pace with this 

 excessive destruction, and there is no doubt that all the wild birds 

 which are chased for their flesh or their plumage are diminishing 

 with a rapidity which justifies the fear that the last of them will 

 soon follow the dodo and the wingless auk. 



Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their flesh 

 or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used as food, 

 are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them by nature, 

 not otherwise specially useful to man, and, therefore, their whole- 

 sale destruction is an economical evil only in the same sense in 

 which all waste of productive capital is an evil.* If it were pos- 

 sible to confine the consumption of game-fowl to a number equal 

 to the annual increase, the world would be a gainer, but not to the 

 same extent as it would be by checking the wanton sacrifice of 

 miUions of the smaller birds, which are of no real value as food, 

 but which, as we have seen, render a most important service by 

 batthng, in our behaK as well as in their own, against the count- 

 less legions of humming and of creeping things, with which the 

 prohfic powers of insect life would otherwise cover the earth. 



Utility cmd Destruction of Reptiles. 



The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally 

 regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and perhaps 

 no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. ]S"everthe- 

 less, snakes as well as hzards and other reptiles are not wholly 



* The increased demand for animal oils for the use of the leather-dresser ia 

 now threatening the penguin with the fate of the wingless auk. According to 

 the Report of the Agricultural Department of the U. S. for August and Sep- 

 tember, 1871, p. 340, small vessels are fitted out for the chase of this bird, and 

 return from a six weeks' cruise with 25,000 or 30,000 gallons of oil. About 

 eleven birds are required for a gallon, and consequently the vessels take upon 

 an average 300,000 penguins each. 



