72 MAN AND HIS ANCESTRY 



never once seen a grub or a wireworm in one ; once or twice I 

 have found a caterpillar of a butterfly, and sometimes I find the 

 remains of a few beetles, but that is seldom. I have examined 

 a few old rooks at nesting time, and found their pouches filled 

 with ordinary earth-worms and nothing else. The damage 

 rooks do to agriculture is something enormous, and in my 

 estimation they are of little or no benefit to us whatever. They 

 swoop down on our new-sown corn in countless numbers, and 

 destroy a crop in a very short time, doing most damage to 

 wheat just as the blade is coming through the ground. The 

 potato crop also is seriously damaged by them. I have killed 

 and examined a great number at that season, and seldom ever 

 found anything inside but chips of young tubers, and stalks 

 that have been attacked by rooks bear no bulbs. It is difficult 

 to estimate the damage done every year by rooks to agriculture, 

 but if the owners of rookeries paid a tax of <! per nest, I 

 believe it would only partly pay for the loss. These birds are 

 over protected, they take little or no notice of anything or any- 

 body, and it would take a lot of guns to keep them off our 

 crops. Again, the damage they do our ricks is serious. They 

 make holes in the roofs and let the rain into the tops, which 

 quite spoils several bags in most of them.' 



XX 



The publication of the ninth and penultimate volume 

 Man and his f the Cambridge Natural History l marks the 

 Ancestry approaching end of a work containing the con- 

 densation of such an amount of research and the harvest 

 of so many intellects as to deserve a word of grateful 

 recognition. The series is the field-naturalist's indis- 

 pensable vade-mecum, or to speak more accurately, work 

 of reference ; for it would be inconvenient to move about 

 with ten volumes, each of six hundred and fifty pages. 



1 London, Macmillan and Co., Limited. 



