1878. ] Lneligibility of the European House Sparrow. 501 
after somewhat excessive multiplication, from any cause, they 
have been injudiciously exterminated in certain districts, it has 
been found necessary to re-stock such districts at great trouble 
and expense. All this, I believe, is admitted on all hands. 
But the principle of mutatis mutandis does not apply to the 
Sparrow in America. The things that would have to be changed 
to make the sparrows fit here cannot be changed. The comple- 
ment of our avifauna was made up without these birds. There 
is no room for them ; and if there is any work for them, time has 
shown that they slight it, or neglect it altogether. The only 
way to make the sparrows eat the worms they were im- 
ported to destroy, and which they seem to specially dislike, 
would be to starve them into such unpalatable fare. Instead of 
that, we sedulously feed them from our tables till they are grown 
too fat and lazy to think of worms. And if we did not do so, it 
would be useless to expect them to take to a diet they do not 
relish, when the streets are full of manure, of which they are 
Specially fond, and the trees of our orchards and lawns are full of 
fruit-blossoms, and the gardens are full of small fruits, and the 
fields are waving with grain—all these things being the xatural 
food of birds of the sparrow tribe, to whom an insectivorous diet 
is only an occasional and temporary variation. 
Again, the matter of the limitless multiplication of these pesti- 
lent famine-breeders presents itself very differently in this 
country. They are extraordinarily prolific. A single female has 
been known to lay over thirty eggs in a season. They ordinarily 
raise three or four broods a year, and may have half a dozen at a 
time. They are safely housed from their natural enemies; rather, 
they have no special enemies in this country, and such enemies 
as their excessive abundance might raise up against them have, 
in at least one case, been summarily disposed of, as in the silly 
action of the Bostonians regarding the shrikes. There is thus 
Practically zo check upon their limitless multiplication, and they 
are insidiously multiplying at a rate that perhaps few suspect. 
A short ten years ago a sparrow was something of a sight any- 
Where; now, the millions we have are countless, The sparrows 
have played mischief enough already, I know; but I say deliber- 
ately, that this is nothing to what the next decade or two will 
. Witness if this desperate sparrow-mania goes on. We may have 
fore long people knocking at the Congressional gates for an 
