18 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
other enemies of our race, take the field in various other 
directions, and keep up what I may call guerilla raids, in- 
cessantly operative on the part of certain members of the 
feathered legions against hordes of injurious animals whose 
damage to the crops is in the aggregate only less than that 
wrought by insects. Such are the small rodents, which live 
entirely upon grass and grain, and whose sharp front teeth 
chisel the farmer out of no inconsiderable part of his cereal 
crops, besides nipping in the bud or root the vegetables 
of the gardener, and girdling the young trees of the 
orchardist. The dashing guerillas who fight against these 
enemies of ours are the birds of prey, the Hawks and Owls, 
a large proportion of which subsist mainly on mice and other 
small mammals, seldom varying this diet except with the 
insects they eat in common with most other birds. People 
are peculiarly blind to the good offices of the rapacious birds 
—a most useful class, whose occasional raids on the poultry- 
yard, even the habitual killing of small insectivorous birds 
by some Hawks, is no offset to the good they do us in destroy- 
ing noxious mammals. Instead of setting a price upon their 
heads, to promote their extinction, we should hold their lives 
priceless. This is a particular instance of the general case, 
that no natural balance of power in the animal world can be 
by man disturbed with impunity. 
Insect pests and mammal plagues—these are the two great 
classes of the husbandman’s foes which birds are appointed 
to hold in check. There are still some other ways in which 
the feathered tribes show themselves the friends of man. 
Some countries are infested with venomous reptiles, so 
numerous and so deadly that the mortality resulting from 
their poisonous bites forms an item in the census, and the 
best means of destroying them engages the attention of gov- 
ernmental officials. In all such countries there are rapacious 
birds which in the aggregate probably devour more noxious 
reptiles than are destroyed by the best directed efforts of 
man. 
