184 FRIENDS WORTH KNOWING. 



It is commonly observed that scarcely any small birds 

 are seen in the depths of a forest, but they become abun- 

 dant as one approaches the neighborhood of settlements. 

 Travellers through Siberia know that they are coming near 

 a village when they begin to hear the voices of birds, which 

 are absent from the intervening solitudes. Every ornithol- 

 ogist has proved these facts in his own experience, and ex- 

 plorers who go to uninhabited and primeval regions have 

 learned not to expect there the chorus that greets their 

 ears from the great army of songsters thronging the fields 

 in populous countries. 



The song-birds the small denizens of our summer 

 groves, pastures, and meadows seem, then, to recognize 

 the presence of man's civilization as a blessing, and have 

 taken advantage of it, both from love of human society and 

 for more solid and prosaic reasons. 



The settlement of a country implies the felling of for- 

 ests, the letting in upon the ground of light and warmth, 

 the propagation of seed-bearing cereals, weeds, and grasses 

 enormously in excess of a natural state of things, the de- 

 struction of noxious quadrupeds and reptiles, and the intro- 

 duction of horses and cattle. Each of these alterations of 

 nature (except in some few cases, like that of the relation 

 of the woodpecker to the cutting away of timber) is a di- 



