CHAPTER XV. 



A PLEA FOR SMALL BIRDS. 



THROUGHOUT the whole range of Natural History there is per- 

 haps no more popular delusion than that which respects blight, 

 and yet I need hardly observe that there are delusions enough 

 and errors enough abroad in every department of Natural 

 History. Let the air be thick and hazy during the prevalence of 

 an east wind, and nineteen out of twenty people of the educated 

 classes, I mean will tell you that it is a ' blight/ having said 

 which they are perfectly satisfied that they have sufficiently ex- 

 plained the whole matter, and no more need be said ; while by the 

 uneducated classes in Wiltshire I have more than once heard 

 that state of atmosphere denounced as a 'blightning,' through the 

 manifest jumbling of this peculiar dark haziness with the vivid 

 concomitant of the thunder-storm. But if you are unreasonably 

 inquisitive, and, being scarcely satisfied with the explanation 

 given, persistently push your inquiries as to how the blight came, 

 and whence it arose, the chances are ninety-nine in a hundred that 

 you will be informed it came with the east wind, borne along on 

 the breeze ; and your informant will triumphantly point to the 

 haziness of the atmosphere, and tell you that it is the Might or 

 blightning, as if the air was really thick through myriads of the 

 tiny insects literally darkening the sun. 



Now, I am the last to say that the air may not be momen- 

 tarily darkened positively and sensibly by the passage of an 

 insect cloud, for I have seen this very thing in the case of a vast 

 flight of locusts in Syria ; but that is a very different matter from 



