60 GRAMINI VOILE. 



the mature gold-finches may be seen labouring with the 

 greatest assiduity the whole day and the whole season ; and 

 by the time that the summer has advanced a little, the young 

 may be found on the ground below, as busy among the 

 groundsels, chick-weeds, and plants of a smaller growth, which? 

 although not so formidable in appearance, are, from their 

 numbers, and the rapidity of their growth and successions, 

 fully as destructive. But though the gold-finches are very 

 industrious, and though they multiply at the rate of three 

 broods in the year, the natural tendency of the plants on 

 which they feed is to multiply many hundreds of times faster ; 

 and man cannot perform a more ornamental or a more useful 

 labour in such places, than by walling his field round with a 

 belt of planting, which will be shelter and protection both to 

 his crop and to the gold-finch. 



That is the act to which man is admonished by Nature, if 

 he would heed her operations ; and it is one to which he is 

 the more admonished, the more skilfully and successfully that 

 he cultivates on the edge of the wild. If he merely scratches 

 with the plough, and manures scantily without drainage, the 

 wild invades him with its ungenial cohorts of carex and moss, 

 covering his grass-land in the winter, and blighting his grain- 

 crop in the autumn ; and it is only when he so drains and 

 otherwise prepares his land as that there is a blowing tilth in 

 the spring, that he brings the thistles up in arms on his fron- 

 tier, and will be invaded by them, if he does not plant the 

 protecting belt of trees, (larches, pines, or spruces, in cold 

 situations, alders in boggy ones, and birches on the extreme 

 of cultivation,) which will defend him far more certainly from 

 the hordes of the desert, than the empire of the descendant 

 of the sun was by the Chinese wall. Any one who examines 

 the lands on the confines of a common, even in the home 

 counties of England (where there is often an unseemly pro- 

 portion of waste), may see proof of these observations. Where 



