By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 



143 



the farms, for nearly the whole of the crops failed for three succes- 

 sive j r ears, and they have since been forced to import rooks and 

 other birds to re-stock their farms with." A similar experiment 

 was made a few years ago in a northern count} 7 , particularly in 

 reference to rooks, but with no better success : the farmers were 

 obliged to reinstate the rooks to save the crops. I have been also 

 credibly informed by an intelligent farmer in Norfolk that "the 

 trees in a neighbouring rookery having been cut down for the 

 repair of farm buildings, and the rooks thereby banished, he has 

 lost hundreds and hundreds of pounds b} r wireworm and a peculiar 

 beetle which abounds in corn fields, which rooks alone destroy ; " 

 by which I conjecture he means the grub of the cockchafer 

 described above. While another occupier in the same county told 

 me, " that one boy after another, placed by him to keep off the 

 rooks from a piece of wheat having 'played him false' (as he 

 called it) he determined to leave it alone; when the rooks actually 

 swarmed on it, and he expected no crop, but to his great surprize, 

 when harvest came, he had the best crop he ever saw." But 

 perhaps the best proof of the advantage supposed to be derived 

 from these birds is, that in some districts enlightened farmers are 

 going to considerable expense and taking great pains to introduce 

 them on their property. 



With such facts before us and such unanswerable evidence of 

 the value of rooks, and of the grievous want of them where they 

 have from any cause been expelled, I feel the greatest confidence 

 in pleading for their preservation ; and to sum up all that has been 

 said in the words of an excellent article in a recent volume of the 

 Quarterly Review : 1 " While the grub of the cockchafer commits 

 great ravages both upon grass and corn by gnawing the roots of 

 the plants so that entire meadows are sometimes denuded by it ; 

 the rook eats those destroyers by thousands, and by one act gets food 

 for himself, and protects the wheat which is the staff of life to 

 man : they are the grubs which chiefly attract him to follow the 

 plough, and when he plucks up a blade of grass or corn it is almost 



Quarterly Review, January, 1858, p. 204, on ** Sense of pain in Men and 

 Animals." 



