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mentions destructive depredations upon the farmer's crops, by 

 clover-worms, -wire- worms, cut-worms, and on the wheat crops 

 particularly by chinch-bugs, Hessian flies, joint- worms and 

 other pests. He thinks it demonstrable that the excessive 

 multiplication of these injurious insects is due to the scarcity of 

 birds. He speaks particularly of the diminution of Wood- 

 peckers as a public calamity. He has known a community of 

 Bed-headed Woodpecker to actually arrest the progress of de- 

 struction from borers in a Pine forest. He mentions the large 

 spotted Woodpecker, called in New England the Flicker, as 

 the only bird he ever saw pulling out worms fi.-om the roots of 

 peach trees. Such a habit must cause the destruction of mil- 

 lions of orchard borers, which are mostly found near the roots 

 of trees. 



The Abbe St. Pierre remarks, " There are insects, noxious 

 in their nature, that prey upon our fruits and our corn. But 

 if snails, May-bugs, caterpillars and locusts ravage our plains, 

 it is because we destroy the bii-ds of our groves that live upon 

 them ; and because when importing the trees of foreign coun- 

 tries into our own, we import at the same time the eggs of the 

 insects which they harbor, while the birds of the same climate 

 — the destroyers of those insects — are left behind. Every 

 country has birds peculiar to itself for the preservation of its 

 plants. I have seen at the Cape of Good Hope, a species 

 called the Gardener's Bird, incessantly employed in destroying 

 the worms and caterpillars, which, as he caught them, he stuck 

 on the thorny prickles of the bushes. I have likewise seen in 

 the Isle of France, a species of Starling, called the Martin, 

 that comes from India, and lives on locusts and other insects 

 that infest cattle. Naturalise these birds in Europe, and no 

 scientific discovery ever made would prove so beneficial to man. 

 But the birds of our own groves would perhaps be sufficient of 

 themselves to clear our plains of these inconveniences, were the 

 bird-catchers forbidden to entrap them. 



" A fancy, some years ago, prevailed in Prussia, of pro- 

 scribing the race of Sparrows, as inimical to agriculture. Every 



