20 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



CHAPTER II, 



FINCHES. 



AMONGST COEN AND FRUIT. 



IN every country in the world, and in all ages, small birds 

 have been conspicuous for good or ill. They have been 

 observed, utilized, petted, and abused in turn by every race 

 under the sun. The Pharaohs owned gilded aviaries 011 the 

 Nile when history itself was only in bud. Assyrian monarchs 

 had a leaning to "the fancy," and the calm grandeur of 

 Babylonian halls echoed, very probably, the pleasant ditties 

 of caged warblers and cooing of doves. Chinese emperors 

 have amused themselves with the brilliant plumaged finches 

 of their flowery land for innumerable ages ; while bird catch- 

 ing and caging is as old as any other institution from the 

 banks of the Ganges to those of the Nile. 



Evidence, classical or mythological, of injury done to 

 human industry by these industrious little spoilers is equally 

 old, from the Hitopadesa to Herodotus and downwards. 



But it is not with diminutive pillagers in lavender or maroon 

 who "spoilt" Egyptian millet crops two thousand years ago that 

 we have to deal, or with any of their kindred who take toll 

 of rice grains, or feed in endless clouds where bamboo harvests 

 are littering the jungle ground. The page or two I have to 

 devote to them is rather about their comparatively few and 

 for the most part sober relatives of these islands, the sparrows 

 and chaffinches of the stackyards, the bullfinches and cherry- 

 loving thrushes of the orchards. 



