479 
DESTllUCTION OF SMALL BIRDS. 
Although it contained some objectionable clauses, which 
have been either amended or entirely withdrawn, it is 
with no small degree of satisfaction that we perceive, by 
the parliamentary reports, that Mr. Pauli has carried the 
readino’ of his bill to arrest the indiscriminate destruction of 
small birds by means of poisoned grain. He says, and says 
truly, it is for the interest of the farmers, who are suffering 
greatly from the increase of slugs and insects, which hitherto 
have been kept under by small birds. 
We look upon most of the attempts made to legalise the 
sale of poisons as visionary—an endeavour to deal with that 
which cannot be accomplished. For what is a poison? 
Linnaeus has said, ^^Food, physic, and poisons merge into 
each other by undefinable gradations.” 
A writer in the Leisure Hour, after denouncing the whole¬ 
sale slaughter of the small birds, thus appropriately closes 
his sensible observations : 
^'This frightful practice of poisoning is one of the hateful 
wiles of human selfisluiess, coupled with the grossest igno¬ 
rance. Of selfishness, because the poisoner assumes that 
the land and all its products are his exclusive property, and 
that the benevolent Creator has designed them for his sole 
use. He does not recognise the claims of the lower orders of 
existence; according to him, they have no business to exist 
at all; he ignores and repudiates the covenant under which 
God has made him master of the world—the covenant being, 
that he should exercise the duty of humanity towards every 
living creature; he imagines tliat the songsters of the grove 
stand in the way of his profit, and therefore, instead of 
acknowledging that they 
“ ‘ Are free to live and to enjoy tlieir life 
As He was free to form them at the first, 
Who in his sovereign wisdom made them all,’ 
he dooms them to death, spurns their claim to his regard, 
and, as far as he can, blots them out of the divine scheme of 
life. Brutal as this conduct is, however, it is not half so 
brutal as it is disgracefully ignorant and presumptuous. The 
great Author of nature has weighed everything in accurate 
scales. He who decreed that every living creature, great and 
small, should be the food of other creatures, took care so to 
strike the balance that no particular race should increase in 
such numbers as to be tyrannous to the rest, while all should 
