282 PERCHERS AND SINGERS 
Worm-Eating Warbler...............4- 84 sets, 416 eggs. 
Yellow Warbler.................00 00 eee 94“ 388 ‘“ 
Oven-Bird coin ieseiiaews eee P08. BS 105 “ 458 “ 
Yellow-Breasted Chat.................. 139 “ 521 “ 
Kentucky Warbler..................0.. 210 “ 917 “ 
Total for 51 species................ 1,274 sets, 5,433 eggs. 
It is such wanton destruction as this which makes me 
“down” on egg-collecting. It is safe to say that the taking 
of those 5,433 warbler eggs robbed the farms and forests of 
New York state of that number of useful birds, not counting 
possible progeny, and did not do one dollar’s worth of good to 
the “‘cause of science” or any other public interest. AlI- 
ready poor “science” has an awful load of crimes against 
nature to answer for. Do not add to it without very strong 
justification. 
The members of the Warbler Family, commonly called 
wood warblers, are distributed all over North America, wher- 
ever insects abound, from the southern edge of the Arctic 
Barren Grounds to southern Mexico. In her very useful 
book, entitled “Birds of the Western United States,’ Mrs. 
Florence Merriam Bailey enumerates forty species; and 
Mr. Frank M. Chapman, in his “Birds of Eastern North 
America,” gives fifty-two. Of these, however, twenty-one 
are duplicated, and therefore the whole number of warblers 
described in the two handbooks is seventy-one. When we 
consider the fact that about sixty of those species are very 
small birds, of uniform size, and many of them quite un- 
marked by striking special colors, the difficulty of becoming 
acquainted with the different species will begin to appear. 
For present purposes, the whole Family can be very fairly 
