8 
an immense amount of interest, if not of deep knowledge ; and such 
books as those of Mr. Kearton, the bird photographer, were as a new 
revelation to boys. At Haileybury prizes were given, not for collec¬ 
tions of any kind, but to the boys who could name the largest 
number of birds and identify them by their song. The habit of 
listening and identifying was the beginning of everything, for after 
observation would come love, or, if not love, at any rate common 
sense, and this would prevent the coming generation from repeating 
those barbarities which were rampant in the past, and still existed to 
some extent in the present. 
Mr. Bosworth Smith, who seconded the motion, pleaded 
especially against the wholesale destruction, not of birds bright and 
beautiful killed for the purposes of fashion and display, but of other 
birds whose extirpation was due to the selfish greed of man, and was 
carried on for the purpose of so-called sport—the birds of prey. He 
was not opposed to sport, but he was greatly opposed to the inordi¬ 
nate and cruel excess to which it was carried, and to that spirit 
which was blind to all that was most beautiful in nature and would 
sweep away anything and everything which could be pointed out by 
the ignorant and brutal as tending to interfere with sport, if, by so 
doing, the number of creatures slaughtered at the annual battue 
might be increased. Birds of prey performed a useful function by 
keeping down the excessive number of certain birds such as wood- 
pigeons and sparrows, and small rodents such as mice ; but because 
for three months of the twelve, when they had clamorous broods to 
feed, they might be guilty of killing a few young pheasants running 
outside the coops, or of sucking the eggs of a few partridges or 
pheasants, they were stigmatized as “vermin” (an opprobrious term 
which ought to be reserved for the most noxious and noisome of 
insects, not applied to some of the loveliest creatures that had 
ever come from the hand of God), and handed over to the tender 
mercies of an illiterate and unobservant, and sometimes brutal and 
bloodthirsty, gamekeeper, to be put to death by gun or poison or 
net, or, worst of all, by the accursed pole-trap. The kestrel, the 
buzzard, and the whole race of owls hardly ever touched a bird : but 
for such as these the gamekeeper set this—he repeated the word— 
accursed pole-trap. Those who had seen, as he had, an owl hanging 
head downwards, with both legs broken, dying by inches in torment, 
could not fail to be stirred by compassion and to long for the day— 
which would shortly come, he believed, thanks to the efforts of the 
Buxton family—when a Bill would be brought into Parliament to 
put an end to this horror. 
He would plead for the preservation, within reasonable limits, of 
every bird of prey, and especially of the crow tribe. As a rule it 
was not the great landowner who was so much to blame, except in 
the matter of that culpable laissez-faire , which led him to put a gun 
