SELBORNIA NA. 
5 S 
such writers as Ruskin, Newman, Helps, Dean Stanley and Miss Frances Power 
Cobbe among our contemporaries, George Herbert and Izaak Walton among past 
worthies. This portion of the book might very well be increased at the expense 
of the Poetical “ Action Pieces ” which fill pp. 381-456. These poetical (?) extracts 
are much inferior, both from a literary and ethical standpoint, to the rest of the 
book. We cannot understand what advantage can possibly arise to any person, 
young or old, from reading or reciting such a “ piece” as that to be found ifi pp. 
442-450. The prose “Addresses to Meetings” are much superior, and include a 
very useful one on “ Kindness and Cruelty,” by Mrs. Suckling herself. 
SELBORN I AN A. 
[An unusually large number of letters for this column have reached us since 
our last number. It is only possible to print a comparatively small selection, but 
we hope to insert some others later on.] 
The Wild Birds Protection Act. — I would invoke the aid of 
Nature Notes in favour of our British Birds, which ought to be to some extent 
sufficiently protected under the present Act of Parliament, but are not. 
Week after week, month after month, and year after year, I have had 
letters telling me of this or that more or less rare bird having been shot in 
this or that place, from Beaumaris to Brislington and from Cornwall to Caithness, 
without a single word of reproach against the offenders or of regret from the 
offenders themselves. 
The shooters in the close-time seem utterly to forget, never to think for a 
moment that they are breaking the law in every such instance, as if that were a 
matter of as little consequence as to some of them the payment of the penalty 
they have incurred would be. 
Not long since I had a letter telling me of the shooting of a hawfinch, and 
that by no means the first. It is one of the few birds which, somehow or other, 
have become more common than they were, not that they are by any means 
plentiful now, but this is not the way to make them more so. And so it is, and 
so it has been, with various others, only too many, that I could tell you of. 
I had a letter only the other day from one of our Yorkshire members of 
Parliament, in which he wrote with proper indignation of this bird murder in the 
case of a rare bird. These thoughtless shooters forget that the close time has 
been fixed as it is on account of its being the building and breeding season of 
the poor birds, and they think nothing of the cruelty involved to the young — left 
forsaken in the nest — as well as the taking of the life of the parent birds, which 
they cannot restore or bring back to them again, any more than they can graft 
the “ violet plucked ” on the stems from which they have been broken off. Many 
and many a time I have watched the parent rooks going back late in the evening 
to feed their young in the rookery at Warter Priory, near here, and from the 
height they have flown they must have come, I have no doubt, for many miles on 
this errand all the day long. They have no right either, these senseless few, 
to destroy the pleasure which our people generally have in seeing the “ fowls 
of the air” taking their happy pastime “above the earth” in the “open 
firmament of heaven.” F. O. Morris 
Nunburnholme Rectory, Hayton, Yorks. 
[We have received a very large number of cuttings from various newspapers 
on the collapse of the ridiculous project of the Birmingham “Oologists” for a 
buccaneering invasion of the Shetland Islands. This scheme has called much 
attention to the necessity for inproving the Wild Birds Protection Acts. At 
the last meeting of the Council of the Selborne Society, a resolution, moved by 
Mr. A. H. Macpherson, was passed, approving with some modifications the 
amendments introduced by Mr. Pease and urging Selbornians to support his Bill.] 
Swallows in February. — My fellow-members may be interested at the 
following item of news. On Monday, February 23rd, I was climbing in the 
belfry of St. Erney Church, near St. German’s in this county. To my great sur- 
