272 The Great World's Farm 



birds" is the one only remedy for the insect epidemics to 

 which the empire is hable, and it is sheer madness to allow 

 them to be killed off. 



We must hope that the "Indian Wild Birds' Protection 

 Act" will at least check the slaughter, for if it be allowed 

 to go on, it can have but one result, and the birds will be 

 avenged here, as they have already been in Europe. 

 When once they are gone, no artificial substitutes can by 

 any possibility make up for them. One may syringe the 

 fruit-trees, cover the gooseberry-bushes with road-dust, 

 pay regiments of school-children to gather grubs by the 

 quart, try in fact all the various expedients which have 

 ever been resorted to, and yet find in the end that it is 

 simply impossible to overtake the damage caused by the 

 absence of the birds, with their marvellously keen sight 

 and extraordinary appetites. 



Let us consider for a moment one single fact. Mr. 

 Darwin found that scarcely more than a sixth part of his 

 seedlings survived the attacks of slugs, snails, and insects. 

 But what does this mean.? Only this, that if the numbers 

 of the enemy had been increased by so much as a sixth, 

 there would have been no seedlings left alive at all. 



Take, for example, the common house-fly, one of which 

 is said to have twenty-one million descendants in the 

 course of a single summer, or would have, if all were 

 allowed to live. That we do not have a yearly plague of 

 flies is due solely to the vigilance of the birds. 



And what quantities they devour! for their digestion 

 is very rapid, and whereas human beings require only a 

 few ounces of dry food a day, they swallow a quantity 

 which is equal to their own weight. Think of it! the 

 weight of a bird in insects; green flies, for instance. 



