THE SPA PRO IV A BR OA D. 
183 
you are knowingly guilty of brutality which no specious phrases, no chatter 
about custom and the conventionalities of royal appointments, can ever by any 
possibility mitigate, much less excuse. 
It is too late to do more than join our protest to that which so 
many other journals have already made against all this cruelty. 
It is common knowledge that Her Majesty has expressed her 
strong disapproval of the practice — a disapproval that should 
have been immediately respected ; and the very fact that the 
buckhounds are to be kept up only another year is an evidence 
of the growing abhorrence and disgust in which such an in- 
stitution is now held by all right-thinking persons. All that is 
left is for us to make the most of this concession, such as it is. 
Trusting that the cure will not come too late, let us hope that 
after the hateful thing has been put away, it will be speedily 
forgotten, and that following in its train a host of other cruel 
amusements will become things of the past. And let ever}’ 
reader of Nature Notes, by word and deed discouraging false 
sport, do his or her part to bring about this result. 
Archibald Clarke. 
THE SPARROW ABROAD. 
great Sparrow Question — “to be or not to be ” — is 
by no means confined to these islands, and we think it 
may be of interest to quote some experiences of ob- 
servers in other lands. It is evidently as difficult 
abroad as at home to sum up and weigh accurately the evidence 
for and against this ubiquitous and irrepressible bird. 
Mr. F. A. Sampson, writing in the American journal. Science, 
for August 5th, is on the side of the sparrows. He gives a long 
list of birds, many with unfamiliar names and some with well- 
known names strangely applied, which have not been affected 
by the sparrow, and he evidently considers the martin more 
than able to hold its own, although the bluebird and the chippee 
have bad times of it. He writes : — 
The town martin has always been in the city in great numbers, making their nests 
in all kinds of cavities around the houses in the business part of the city. These 
same places were taken possession of by the sparrows ; and they being here the 
year round, and making nests even in the w'inter time, the places belonging to 
the martins were appropriated before their arrival, and when they came they had 
to tight to recover them. I was much interested in watching one of these fights. 
Across the roof of a one-story building, next to my office, and in the top of the 
adjoining building, a martin had found a hole, and had appropriated a place 
within for a nest. A sparrow had also afterwards done the same, and was found 
in possession when the martin arrived from its winter pilgrimage. The latter at 
once gave fight, and time and again during their fight they would fall to the roof 
below, and were so intently engaged that more than once I had my hand almost 
upon them before they would let go of each other. The martin won the fight, 
and the sparrow gave up the nest it had taken. As I now sit in my yard the 
martins are circling overhead by the hundred, they staying during the day in the 
