190 
NATURE NOTES. 
this agonising death to minister to her vanity. I believe that hundreds of kind- 
hearted ladies would agree never to wear an aigrette plume again, did they but 
know how it is obtained. 
Another sorrowful fact is that swallows, our graceful summer visitors, are 
becoming noticeably less in number every year, and the reason is not far to seek. 
Telegraph wires, with strong batteries attached to them, are erected in many 
places on the French coast, and as the poor swallows arrive, tired and worn from 
their long flight across the .sea, they alight upon the wires to rest. A pov/erful 
electric shock is their cruel welcome, and down they fall in thousands, to be sent 
to the 10,000 workpeople employed in Paris in preparing bird skins for the 
English market. 
I cannot but think that if these and endless other cruelties were widely made 
known, surely true-hearted English ladies would resolve never again to buy a hat 
or bonnet adorned with small birds’ wings or aigrettes. There is no cruelty in 
wearing ostrich feathers if they are carefully cut at the proper season, and the 
quill ends left in the wing until the new feathers are formed, when the dead 
quill may be taken out without pain to the bird. 
The game birds used for food furnish a wide range of coloured plumes to suit 
almost every shade that may be required, so that there is really no excuse for 
exterminating some of the loveliest of God’s handiworks in this wanton manner. 
I must touch upon one other aspect of this question. Last summer, in two 
forests in France, fifteen thousand nightingales, flycatchers, and other insect- 
eating birds were captured by the electric wire arrangements to supply the demands 
of fashion. When the balance of Nature is thus interfered with, farmers and 
gardeners must expect to pay a heavy penalty in seeing swarms of insects de- 
vouring their crops, unchecked by the thousands of innocent and useful birds 
which were created to keep them under. 
When milliners find their customers constantly refusing to purchase bird- 
trimmed hats, the fashion will soon die out. Our kind hearted Queen and the 
princesses have declared themselves against this cruel custom, and it only needs 
a determined effort on the part of the leaders of fashion to put an end to it 
altogether. I will conclude by mentioning the Society for the Protection of 
Birds, and urging all ladies to belong to it. All that is needful is to send name 
and address with two penny stamps to Mrs. Lemon, Hon. Sec., Hillcrest, Red- 
hill, when a card of membership with rules will be forwarded. An annual sub- 
scription of one shilling makes the donor an associate of the Society and entitled 
to receive the annual report and notice of all general meetings. 
Eliza Brightwen. 
THE GROUSE.* 
The design of the “Fur and Feather Series ” is to present monographs on 
the English birds and beasts which are generally included under the head of 
game. That on the partridge has already been noticed in these columns, and 
we have now a delightful volume devoted to that peculiarly British bird the red 
grouse. The grouse is perhaps economically the most important bird in the 
British Islands. The wonderful journey north, of which Mr. Stuart-Wortley 
pens such a realistic description in “The Scotch Mail” is, as he points out, 
“only one of the many combinations which English brains and love of sport 
have rendered not only possible, but usual Exactly sixteen 
hours from the time you were driving through Bloomsbury you have killed a 
right and left of Perthshire grouse, on a spot which fifty years ago would have 
taken eight days to reach.” And further, he calls our attention to the facts that 
* The Grouse. Natural History by the Rev. H. A. Macpherson ; Shooting 
by A. J. Stuart-Wortley ; Cookery by George Saintsbury ; pp. vi., 293 ; vignette, 
12 plates, and various diagrams. Longmans, Green & Co., 1894. Price 5s. 
