1898.] ESSAYS. 71 



the tent caterpillars, and many others are better known to the 

 members of this society than to myself. 



Then the birds and insects, we may leave with the Natural 

 History Society, and I suppose too we should leave to that 

 organization some other very important matters connected with 

 our horticultural interests. Take for example the bats. Those 

 are Natural History specimens of course, but what the bats do in 

 a country is undoubtedly a horticultural interest. We have the 

 birds to take care of the insects — the swallows and the fly-catch- 

 ers in the air, the perchers and warblers in the trees, and a 

 number of birds on the ground — but all of these are day feed- 

 ing. A great many of the insects have dodged the birds by 

 taking recourse to the night, so that many of our most noxious 

 and destructive insects are nocturnal, like the coddling moth 

 itself. Bats are the only animals which can serve us for 

 night-flying insects. They fly from dusk to early morning, 

 collecting insects much of the time. We have no idea how much 

 good one of these little creatures does in a community. Night 

 after night I see them about the orchard, and the value of one of 

 these little animals, I think, might easily amount to fifty dollars 

 a year. And still our education on just this point fails, when it 

 is possible for boys, as I found only a year ago, to go into a barn 

 where bats are colonized and poke them out and knock them 

 down with hay rakes, " for the fun of it." On such points as this 

 our horticultural and our educational interests should be made to 

 focus. We should teach the children in what way they are con- 

 travening important interests of the community by action of this 

 sort. It is really a lack in education, and there is no blame to 

 be attached to the children, and I do not think there is any 

 blame to be attached to them for stonins: and clubbing the chest- 

 nut trees. It is all, it seems to me, a matter of quality of 

 education ; and our problem is to give them a quality of educa- 

 tion which shall make such vandalism impossible. 



Again, too, as to our common toad ; its work in the city con- 

 stitutes a great horticultural interest, very little appreciated, but 

 which every child should know. The damage and annoyance 

 caused by insects is something enormous. At a recent meeting 



