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THE ede OF BIRDS. 
~ OCT 18 1921 
241 
mine obliges me to concede leadership to you, 
Tron-leg. Arrogance is your greatness—and 
great it is as the world goes; for by that you 
have the most skillful, the strongest, the most 
gifted hands in the community where you re- 
side to turn your grindstone. Imputed talents 
show in you fruits like real ones do in others, 
because you conduct a kind of presidency over 
the riches of other minds, and even claim that 
- doing so is exercising the highest talent of all. 
Grant you, Iron-leg, it is the talent of kings and 
rulers; but you will never get a presidency over 
the intellectual progeny of the tramping old star- 
. gazing bachelor, whose legs I saw a while ago, 
~, nor over the poet’s song, the painter’s pencil, or 
the philosopher’s microscope. You— 
Bless me! Here is my coffee and toast, cold 
as a dog’s nose! Now I must be after my own 
- legs. 
THE FOOD OF BIRDS. 
«POW rich our Lord God must be!” says | 
Martin Luther in his Table-Talk; ‘I 
do verily believe that to feed the sparrows in 
Germany costs Him more than all the revenue 
of the King of France.” 
What do all the birds eat? Where do they 
all find food enough to support their own lives 
and the lives of their young? ‘These are ques- 
tions which are continually coming up in every- 
day life, together with that other set of reproach- 
ful queries as to why the birds don’t eat up the 
caterpillars and canker-worms, and let alone 
cherries and strawberries. In view of the very 
general interest which attaches to the matter, 
and of the frequency with which the above- 
mentioned questions are asked, it seems strange 
that so small an amount of organized knowledge 
bearing upon this subject has as yet been col- 
lected. 
As to the large amount of food which some 
birds are capable of absorbing there is a set of 
thoroughly scientific experiments by Professor 
Treadwell, of Cambridge, upon the young of 
the American robin. A couple of vigorous, 
half-grown birds having been selected in the 
early part of June, the Professor began to feed 
them with earth-worms, giving three of these 
to each bird the first night; next day he gave 
them ten worms each, which they ate ravenous- 
ly; but thinking this quantity of food to be 
greater than that which could naturally be sup- 
plied by their parents he limited the birds to this 
allowance. On the third day he gave to each 
bird eight worms in the forenoon’; but in the 
afternoon he found one of them becoming feeble, 
and soon after it refused food and died; on 
opening it, he found the crop, gizzard, and in- 
testines entirely empty, and concluded therefore 
that it had died from want of sufficient food, 
the effect of hunger being perhaps increased by 
cold, as the thermometer was only about 60°. 
The other bird, still vigorous, he put in a warm- 
er place, and increased its food, giving it the 
third day fifteen worms, on the fourth day twen- 
ty-four, on the fifth twenty-five, on the sixth 
thirty, and on the seventh thirty-one worms. 
These quantities, however, seemed to be insuf- 
ficient, and, as the bird appeared to be losing 
plumpness and weight, the Professor began to 
weigh both the bird and its food, and to tabu- 
late the results of these weighings. By this 
table it appears that though the food was in- 
creased to forty worms, weighing twenty penny- 
weights, on the eleventh day the weight of the 
bird rather fell off, and it was not until the 
fourteenth day when the bird ate sixty-eight 
worms, weighing thirty-four pennyweights, that 
his weight began to increase. On this day the 
weight of the bird was twenty-four pennyweights; 
he therefore ate forty-one per cent. more than 
his own weight in twelve hours; weighing aft- 
er it twenty-nine pennyweights, or fifteen per 
cent.) less than the food he had eaten in that 
time. On the fifteenth day a small quantity of 
raw meat was Offered to the bird, and it be- 
ing found that this was readily eaten it was 
afterward employed to the gradual exclusion:of 
worms. 
As an offset to the objection that the earth- 
worm contains but a small amount of solid nu- 
tritious matter, the bird was fed upon the twen- 
ty-seventh day exclusively on clear beef, in quan- 
tity twenty-three pennyweights; at night the bird 
weighed fifty-two pennyweights, this being but 
little more than twice the amount of flesh con- 
sumed during the day, no account being taken 
of the water, earth, and gravel, of which large 
quantities were daily swallowed. This presents 
a wonderful contrast with the amount of food 
required by the cold-blooded vertebrates, fishes, « 
and reptiles, many of which can live for months 
without food, and also with that required by 
mammalia. A man at this rate should eat about 
seventy pounds of flesh per day, and drink five 
or six gallons cf water. 
_ With regard to the question, how can this im- 
mense amount of food required by the young 
birds be supplied by the parents? Professor 
Treadwell enters into the following computation : 
Suppose a pair of old robins with the usual num- 
ber of four young ones, these would daily re- 
quire, according to the consumption of the bird 
subjected to experiment, two hundred and fifty 
worms, or their equivalent in insects or other 
food ; suppose the parents to work ten hours, or 
six hundred minutes, to procure this supply; 
this would be a worm in every two and four 
tenth’s minutes; or each parent must procure 
a worm or its equivalent in less than fiye min- 
utes during ten hours, in addition to the food 
required for its own support. But after all the 
Professor is compelled to confess his inability to 
reconcile the calculation with actual observation 
of robins, which he has never seen return to 
their nests oftener than once in ten minutes. 
The bird experimented upon by Professor 
Treadwell attained its full size on the thirty- 
second day after having been captured, after 
which time it ceased to increase in weight; its 
dict from this time on amounted on the average 
