38 THE SCHOOL GARDEN. 



garden, if it can be kept from the beehives ; for it is 

 otherwise harmless as well as useful. The bats will be 

 spared ; even the buzzards and the owls will be secure 

 as soon as the village youth know that we have only 

 two birds of prey, the hawk and the magpie. The birds 

 will then find protection ; gentle hands will strew food 

 for our singing birds during the winter, and the laws 

 which aim to protect these friends of man will be re- 

 spected. The destroyer of nests and the bird catcher 

 will cease from among men. The singing of binds will 

 enliven the earth and awaken agreeable and friendly 

 feeling where it is now wanting. The titmouse, if un- 

 molested, will increase incredibly, and many useful 

 birds starlings and jackdaws for instance will be in- 

 vited to domesticate themselves by little breeding-houses 

 where they have been seen hitherto only as fleeting 

 guests. Breeding houses for birds belong to school 

 gardens as truly as salt does to bread, or a cup to the 

 social meal.* The few examples mentioned which do 

 not claim to be exhaustive in number, may suffice to 

 show that the school garden can draw within the sphere 

 of its direct and indirect activity a considerable part of 

 the animal world of the home region. 



* It has been calculated that the blue titmouse daily consumes at least three-quar- 

 ters of an ounce of butterfly's eggs, and that this amounts to between 15,000 and 

 20,000 caterpillars. This little bird, then, destroys in one year six and a half mil- 

 lions of such injurious insects ! Every pair of titmice brings up yearly from 

 twenty-tour to thirty-two young, and if the nourishment of these last amounts to 

 only half that of the old birds, it gives the consumption of the monstrous sum of 

 twenty-four millions of injurious insects by a single family of torn-tits. A cuckoo 

 destroys more than a hundred caterpillars in an hour ; a red-start about six hun- 

 dred flies ; and innumerable such examples can be found. By the killing of one 

 cuckoo, one titmouse, or one finch in the district inhabited by such a bird, as 

 many pecks or other measure of injurious insects as correspond to its wants, will 

 be let loose upon the vegetation. 



