154 BIRD HAUNTS AND NATURE MEMORIES 



farmers' hen runs easier to loot, and the native fauna 

 stupidly indifferent; rabbits had competed with stoats 

 in the old country; these unsophisticated natives were 

 simple game. Goats on St. Helena enjoyed the native 

 forests, and wiped out countless creatures which these 

 had formerly supported, and in oceanic islands every- 

 where the omnivorous rat has swept interesting insular 

 forms away, leaving the zoologist irate but impotent. 



What is so easy to see where vertebrates are the chief 

 actors is not so evident amongst the lower forms of life, 

 but the great changes, the struggles for the mastery, are 

 just as keen, just as ruthless in result. 



Indeed, the wholesale destruction is numerically much 

 greater than amongst vertebrates, and not merely because 

 the smaller fry are more abundant. Year by year, if 

 we observe and think, we witness a calamity, a massacre 

 more ruthless than anything in vertebrate economy. 

 What, for instance, happens to the house flies ? They 

 annoyed us thoroughly during the summer months; we 

 wished them anywhere but where they were; then 

 autumn came and all vanished. Here and there on wall 

 or window-pane we found one stiff and dead, in attitude 

 of life, but glued to its sarcophagus by the deadly fungus 

 that ate its life away; but we only see a few, millions 

 perish unnoticed. Just enough survive to carry on the 

 race, to repeople the world with winged annoyance. 

 And the aphides, the green fly, which clustered in un- 

 countable crowds on our plants, sucking the life-blood 

 of our cherished roses, our necessary vegetables, our 

 forest trees; the stem mother produced millions of par- 

 thenogenetic offspring, generation after generation during 

 the summer. Alarming calculations were issued to warn 

 us what would happen if the garden were neglected; we 

 syringe, we employ all kinds of restraints and preventive 

 methods, but the aphides continue to multiply. Then 



