13 



drinking at the bird fountain and helping themselves to any- 

 thing they wish in the garden or chicken roop. But with all 

 this, I have been much interested in watching them catch insects 

 like good, honest, hard-working native birds. They chase 

 moths, work over a rosebush until every saw-fly is found, and 

 assume the attitude and industry of warblers in their patience 

 and thoroughness. 



Black-locust trees shade the front porch of the house and 

 these are badly infested with leaf-miners. I can not be positive, 

 but what are the sparrows hunting when they go quietly from 

 twig to twig through these trees unless it is the miners? And 

 do they break through the epidermis of the leaf to get at them? 



The only insects the sparrows seem to avoid are the hard, 

 green "June-bugs" with very scratchy legs, which are so abund- 

 ant just now that when I approach a peach tree on the fruit of 

 which the beetles are feeding, it seems that I have disturbed a 

 nest of big bumblebees. Robins and redbirds live in the back 

 of the garden, but they also seem to avoid the "June-bugs." 



It is only fair that I make this somewhat tardy and forced 

 admission regarding the value of English sparrows in the great 

 battle between insects and man. 



I watched a most interesting contest between a female English 

 sparrow and a bird-wing grasshopper. — the one with the pretty 

 yellow and black wings that "dances" in the summer sunshine. 

 For fully five minutes the sparrow chased the insect up and down 

 the street, being foiled at every turn by the quickness of the 

 grasshopper, which rose higher in the air or dropped to a lower 

 level as an aeroplane would do to escape a Zeppelin. I never 

 saw a bird seem so heavy and so helpless as this one in its 

 continued vain efforts to make a captive, and it finally abandoned 

 the chase, allowing the insect to fly away on triumphant wing, 



W. A. MURRILL. 



Lynchburg, Va., Aug. ii, 1924. 



BOOK REVIEWS 



House's List of New York State Plants* 



No recent systematic paper better illustrates the intolerable 

 conditions existing in nomenclature than this list of New York 



* House, H. D. Annotated list of the ferns and flowering plants of New- 

 York State. Bull. N. Y. State Mus. 254: 1-757. September, 1924. 



