576 A Plea for the Rooks. 



the Quarterly Review :* ' While the grub of the cockchafer com- 

 mits great ravages both upon grass and corn by gnawing the 

 roots of the plants so that entire meadows are sometimes denuded 

 by it, the Hook eats those destroyers by thousands, and by one 

 act gets food for himself and protects the wheat which is the 

 staff of life to man ; they are the grubs which chiefly attract him 

 to follow the plough, and when he plucks up a blade of grass or 

 corn it is almost invariably for the sake of some description of 

 worm which is preying upon its root. The plant which he eradi- 

 cates will be found upon examination to be dead or dying, and 

 by devouring the cause of the mischief he saves the rest of the 

 field from blight. Unobservant persons, who never look below 

 the surface, often mistake the policeman for the thief: luckily, 

 their power to injure their benefactor is not equal to their will, 

 or they would exterminate him altogether, and leave the depre- 

 dators unmolested to consume the whole of the crops. When 

 an unhappy success has attended efforts of this kind, we have 

 seen that the evil consequences have been signal and immediate.' 



A flight of Rooks, then, renders services which could not be 

 performed by all the cultivators of the soil put together ; and if 

 the poor birds are occasionally mischievous, they are richly 

 worthy of their hire. Make the largest possible allowance for 

 their consumption of a portion of that crop, the whole of which 

 they preserve, and they are still immeasurably the cheapest 

 labourers employed upon a farm. Volumes would be required 

 to tell all the mistakes which are committed in the blind 

 for destruction, and in the readiness of man to believe that 

 everything which tastes what he tastes is a rival and a loss. 



But I do trust that that day of short-sighted ignorance is not 

 to return to Wiltshire, and that we no longer jumble in one 

 miserable confusion our friends with our foes. I trust that we 

 have learnt to know our benefactors ; and if the Rooks do take a 

 little of our newly sown grain, or, when pinched by hard weather, 



Quarterly Review, January, 1858, p. 204, on 'Sense of Pain in Men and 

 Animals.' 



