Chapter XII: Introduction: Of Birds (1)

Man has undesignedly introduced into now districts perhaps fewer species of birds than of quadrupeds; [Footnote: The first mention I have found of the naturalization of a wild bird in modern Europe is in the Menagiana, vol. iii., p. 174, edition of 1715, where it is stated that Rene, King of Sicily and Duke of Anjou, who died in 1480, introduced the red-legged partridge into the latter country. Attempts have been made, and I believe with success, to naturalize the European lark on Long Island, and the English sparrow has been introduced into various parts of the Northern States, where he is useful by destroying noxious insects and worms not preyed upon by native birds. The humming-bird has resisted all efforts to acclimate him in Europe, though they have not unfrequently survived the passage across the ocean. In Switzerland and some other parts of Europe the multiplication of insectivorous birds is encouraged by building nests for them, and it is alleged that both fruit and forest trees have been essentially benefited by the protection thus afforded them.] but the distribution of birds is very much influenced by the character of his industry, and the transplantation, of every object of agricultural production is, at a longer or shorter interval, followed by that of the birds which feed upon its seeds, or more frequently upon the insects it harbors. The vulture, the crow, and other winged scavengers, follow the march of armies as regularly as the wolf. Birds accompany ships on long voyages, for the sake of the offal which is thrown overboard, and, in such cases, it might often happen that they would breed and become naturalized in countries where they had been unknown before. [Footnote: Gulls hover about ships in port, and often far out at sea, diligently watching for the waste of the caboose. While the four great fleets, English, French, Turkish, and Egyptian, were lying in the Bosphorus, in the summer and autumn of 1853, a young lady of my family called my attention to the fact that the gulls were far more numerous about the ships of one of the fleets than about the others. This was verified by repeated observation, and the difference was owing no doubt to the greater abundance of the refuse from the cookrooms of the naval squadron most frequented by the birds. Persons acquainted with the economy of the navies of the states in question, will be able to conjecture which fleet was most favored with these delicate attentions. The American gull follows the steamers up the Mississippi, and has been shot 1,500 miles from the sea.] There is a familiar story of an English bird which built its nest in an unused block in the rigging of a ship, and made one or two short voyages with the vessel while hatching its eggs. Had the young become fledged while lying in a foreign harbor, they would of course have claimed the rights of citizenship in the country where they first took to the wing. [Footnote: Birds do not often voluntarily take passage on board ships bound for foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, injured a wing, and was unable to join his fellows when they commenced their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily identified at a considerable distance. As his wing grew stronger, he made several unsatisfactory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded in reaching a passing ship bound southward, and perched himself on a topsail-yard. I happened to witness this movement, and observed him quietly maintaining his position as long as I could discern him with a spy-glass. I supposed he finished the voyage, for he certainly did not return to the palace.]

An unfortunate popular error greatly magnifies the injury done to the crops of grain and leguminous vegetables by wild birds. Very many of those generally supposed to consume large quantities of the seeds of cultivated plants really feed almost exclusively upon insects, and frequent the wheatfields, not for the sake of the grain, but for the eggs, larvae, and fly of the multiplied tribes of insect life which are so destructive to the harvests. This fact has been so well established by the examination of the stomachs of great numbers of birds in Europe and the United States, at different seasons of the year, that it is no longer open to doubt, and it appears highly probable that even the species which consume more or less grain generally make amends by destroying insects whose ravages would have been still more injurious. [Footnote: Even the common crow has found apologists, and it has been asserted that he pays for the Indian corn he consumes by destroying the worms and larva which infest that plant.

Professor Treadwell, of Massachusetts, found that a half-grown American robin in confinement ate in one day sixty-eight worms, weighing together nearly once and a half as much as the bird himself, and another had previously starved upon a daily allowance of eight or ten worms, or about twenty per cent. of his own weight. The largest of these numbers appeared, so far as could be judged by watching parent birds of the same species, as they brought food to their young, to be much greater than that supplied to them when fed in the nest; for the old birds did not return with worms or insects oftener than once in ten minutes on an average. It we suppose the parents to hunt for food twelve hours in a day, and a nest to contain four young, we should have seventy-two worms, or eighteen each, as the daily supply of the brood. It is probable enough that some of the food collected by the parents may be more nutritious than the earthworms, and consequently that a smaller quantity sufficed for the young in the nest than when reared under artificial conditions.

The supply required by growing birds is not the measure of their wants after they have arrived at maturity, and it is not by any means certain that great muscular exertion always increases the demand for nourishment, either in the lower animals or in man. The members of the English Alpine Club are not distinguished for appetites which would make them unwelcome guests to Swiss landlords, and I think every man who has had the personal charge of field or railway hands, must have observed that laborers who spare their strength the least are not the most valiant trencher champions. During the period when imprisonment for debt was permitted in New England, persons confined in country jails had no specific allowance, and they were commonly fed without stint. I have often inquired concerning their diet, and been assured by the jailers that their prisoners, who were not provided with work or other means of exercise, consumed a considerably larger supply of food than common out-door laborers.] On this subject, we have much other evidence besides that derived from dissection. Direct observation has shown, in many instances, that the destruction of wild birds has been followed by a great multiplication of noxious insects, and, on the other hand, that these latter have been much reduced in numbers by the protection and increase of the birds that devour them. Many interesting facts of this nature have been collected by professed naturalists, but I shall content myself with a few taken from familiar and generally accessible sources. The following extract is from Michelet, L'Oiseau, pp. 169,170:

"The STINGY farmer--an epithet justly and feelingly bestowed by Virgil. Avaricious, blind, indeed, who proscribes the birds--those destroyers of insects, those defenders of his harvests. Not a grain for the creature which, during the rains of winter, hunts the future insect, finds out the nests of the larvae, examines, turns over every leaf, and destroys, every day, thousands of incipient caterpillars. But sacks of corn for the mature insect, whole fields for the grasshoppers, which the bird would have made war upon. With eyes fixed upon his furrow, upon the present moment only, without seeing and without foreseeing, blind to the great harmony which is never broken with impunity, he has everywhere demanded or approved laws for the extermination of that necessary ally of his toil--the insectivorous bird. And the insect has well avenged the bird. It has become necessary to revoke in haste the proscription. In the Isle of Bourbon, for instance, a price was set on the head of the martin; it disappeared, and the grasshopper took possession of the island, devouring, withering, scorching with a biting drought all that they did not consume. In North America it has been the same with the starling, the protector of Indian corn. [Footnote: I hope Michelet has good authority for this statement, but I am unable to confirm it.] Even the sparrow, which really does attack grain, but which protects it still more, the pilferer, the outlaw, loaded with abuse and smitten with curses--it has been found in Hungary that they were likely to perish without him, that he alone could sustain the mighty war against the beetles and the thousand winged enemies that swarm in the lowlands; they have revoked the decree of banishment, recalled in haste this valiant militia, which, though deficient in discipline, is nevertheless the salvation of the country. [Footnote: Apropos of the sparrow--a single pair of which, according to Michelet, p. 315, carries to the nest four thousand and three hundred caterpillar or coleoptera in a week--I find in an English newspaper a report of a meeting of a "Sparrow Club," stating that the member who took the first prize had destroyed 1,467 of these birds within the year, and that the prowess of the other members had brought the total number up to 11,944 birds, besides 2,553 eggs. Every one of the fourteen thousand hatched and unhatched birds, thus sacrificed to puerile vanity and ignorant prejudice, would have saved his bushel of wheat by preying upon insects that destroy the grain.]

"Not long since, in the neighborhood of Ronen and in the valley of Monville, the blackbird was for some time proscribed. The beetles profited well by this proscription; their larvae, infinitely multiplied, carried on their subterranean labors with such success, that a meadow was shown me, the surface of which was completely dried up, every herbaceous root was consumed, and the whole grassy mantle, easily loosened, might have been rolled up and carried away like a carpet."

The general hostility of the European populace to the smaller birds is, in part, the remote effect of the reaction created by the game laws. When the restrictions imposed upon the chase by those laws were suddenly removed in France, the whole people at once commenced a destructive campaign against every species of wild animal. Arthur Young, writing in Provence, on the 30th of August, 1789, soon after the National Assembly had declared the chase free, thus complains of the annoyance he experienced from the use made by the peasantry of their newly-won liberty. "One would think that every rusty firelock in all Provence was at work in the indiscriminate destruction of all the birds. The wadding buzzed by my ears, or fell into my carriage, five or six times in the course of the day." ... "The declaration of the Assembly that every man is free to hunt on his own land ... has filled all France with an intolerable cloud of sportsmen. ... The declaration speaks of compensations and indemnities [to the seigneurs], but the ungovernable populace takes advantage of the abolition of the game laws and laughs at the obligation imposed by the decree."

The contagious influence of the French Revolution occasioned the removal of similar restrictions, with similar results, in other countries. The habits then formed have become hereditary on the Continent, and though game laws still exist in England, there is little doubt that the blind prejudices of the ignorant and half-educated classes in that country against birds are, in some degree, at least, due to a legislation, which, by restricting the chase of game worth killing, drives the unprivileged sportsman to indemnify himself by slaughtering all wild life which is not reserved for the amusement of his betters. Hence the lord of the manor buys his partridges and his hares by sacrificing the bread of his tenants, and so long as the members of "Sparrow Clubs" are forbidden to follow higher game, they will suicidally revenge themselves by destroying the birds which protect their wheatfields.

On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes and other small birds are annually brought to market. [Footnote: Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down into the nets by throwing stones over them.

In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with grove-like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors. These serve to collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plantatious are called ragnaje, and the reader will find, in Bindi's edition of Davanzati, a very pleasant description of a ragnaja, though its authorship is not now ascribed to that eminent writer. Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vogel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and, the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the moles are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles of land under water. See Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1847, 1 semestre, p. 150; VOGT, Nutzliche und schadliche Thiere; and particularly articles in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 16. See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 707, an article entitled Nutzen der Vogel fur die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that "without birds no agriculture or even vegetation would be possible." In an interesting memoir by Rondani, published in the Bolletino del Comizio agrario di Parma for December, 1868, it is maintained that birds are often injurious to the agriculturist, by preying not only on noxious insects, but sometimes exclusively, or at least by preference, on entomophagous tribes which would otherwise destroy those injurious to cultivated plants. See also articles by Prof. Sabbioni in the Giornale di Agricoltura di Bologna, November and December, 1870, and other articles in the same journal of 15th and 30th April, 1870.]

Birds are less hardy in constitution, they possess less facility of accommodation, [Footnote: Wild birds are very tenacious in their habits. The extension of particular branches of agriculture introduces new birds; but unless in the case of such changes in physical conditions, particular species seem indissolubly attached to particular localities. The migrating tribes follow almost undeviatingly the same precise line of flight in their annual journeys, and establish themselves in the same breeding-places from year to year. The stork is a strong-winged bird and roves far for food, but very rarely establishes new colonies. He is common in Holland, but unknown in England. Not above five or six pairs of storks commonly breed in the suburbs of Constantinople along the European shore of the narrow Bosphorous, while--much to the satisfaction of the Moslems, who are justly proud of the marked partiality of so orthodox a bird--dozens of chimneys of the true believers on the Asiatic side are crowned with his nests. The appearance of the dove-like grouse, Tetrao paradoxus, or Syrrhaptus Pallassi, in various parts of Europe, in 1850 and the following years, is a noticable exception to the law of regularity which seems to govern the movements and determine the habitat of birds. The proper home of this bird is the Steppes of Tartary, and it is no recorded to have been observed in Europe, or at least west of Russia, until the year above mentioned, when many flocks of twenty or thirty, and even a hundred individuals, were seen in Bohemia, Germany, Holland, Denmark, England, Ireland, and France. A considerable flock frequented the Frisian island of Borkum for more than five months. It was hoped that they would breed and remain permanently in the island but this expectation has now been disappointed, and the steppe-grouse seems to have disappeared again altogether.] and they are more severely affected by climatic excess than quadrupeds. Besides, they generally want the special means of shelter against the inclemency of the weather and against pursuit by their enemies, which holes and dens afford to burrowing animals and to some larger beasts of prey. The egg is exposed to many dangers before hatching, and the young bird is especially tender, defenceless, and helpless. Every cold rain, every violent wind, every hailstorm during the breeding season, destroys hundreds of nestlings, and the parent often perishes with her progeny while brooding over it in the vain effort to protect it. [Footnote: It is not the unfledged and the nursing bird alone that are exposed to destruction by severe weather. Whole flocks of adult and strong-winged tribes are killed by hail. Severe winters are usually followed by a sensible diminution in the numbers of the non-migrating birds, and a cold storm in summer often proves fatal to the more delicate species. On the 10th of June, 184-, five or six inches of snow fell in Northern Vermont. The next morning I found a hummingbird killed by the cold, and hanging by its claws just below a loose clapboard on the wall of a small wooden building where it had sought shelter.] The great proportional numbers of birds, their migratory habits, and the ease with which, by their power of flight they may escape most dangers that beset them, would seem to secure them from extirpation, and even from very great numerical reduction. But experience shows that when not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, they yield very readily to the hostile influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man. [Footnote: Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 400, observes: "Of birds it is estimated that the number of those which die every year equals the aggregate number by which the species to which they respectively belong is, on the average, permanently represented." A remarkable instance of the influence of new circumstances upon birds was observed upon the establishment of a light-house on Cape Cod some years since. The morning after the lamps were lighted for the first time, more than a hundred dead birds of several different species, chiefly water-fowl, were found at the foot of the tower. They had been killed in the course of the night by flying against the thick glass or grating of the lantern. From an article by A. Esquiros, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for Sept. 1, 1864, entitled, La vie Anglaise, p. 110, it appears that such occurrences as that stated in the note have been not unfrequent on the British coast. Are the birds thus attracted by new lights, flocks in migration?

Migrating birds, whether for greater security from eagles, hawks, and other enemies, or for some unknown reason, perform a great part of their annual journeys by night; and it is observed in the Alps that they follow the high roads in their passage across the mountains. This is partly because the food in search of which they must sometimes descend is principally found near the roads. It is, however, not altogether for the sake of consorting with man, or of profiting by his labors, that their line of flight conforms to the paths he has traced, but rather because the great roads are carried through the natural depressions in the chain, and hence the birds can cross the summit by these routes without rising to a height where at the seasons of migration the cold would be excessive. The instinct which guides migratory birds in their course is not in all cases infallible, and it seems to be confounded by changes in the condition of the surface. I am familiar with a village in New England, at the junction of two valleys, each drained by a mill-stream, where the flocks of wild geese which formerly passed, every spring and autumn, were very frequently lost, as it was popularly phrased, and I have often heard their screams in the night as they flew wildly about in perplexity as to the proper course. Perhaps the village lights embarrassed them, or perhaps the constant changes in the face of the country, from the clearings then going on, introduced into the landscape features not according with the ideal map handed down in the anserine family, and thus deranged its traditional geography.]

Nature sets bounds to the disproportionate increase of birds, while at the same time, by the multitude of their resources, she secures them from extinction through her own spontaneous agencies. Man both preys upon them and wantonly destroys them. The delicious flavor of game-birds, and the skill implied in the various arts of the sportsman who devotes himself to fowling, make them favorite objects of the chase, while the beauty of their plumage, as a military and feminine decoration, threatens to involve the sacrifice of the last survivor of many once numerous species. Thus far, but few birds described by ancient or modern naturalists are known to have become absolutely extinct, though there are some cases in which they are ascertained to have utterly disappeared from the face of the earth in very recent times. The most familiar instances are those of the dodo, a large bird peculiar to the Mauritius or Isle of France, exterminated about the year 1690, and now known only by more or less fragmentary skeletons, and the solitary, which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, but has not been seen for more than a century. A parrot and some other birds of the Norfolk Island group are said to have lately become extinct. The wingless auk, Alca impennis, a bird remarkable for its excessive fatness, was very abundant two or three hundred years ago in the Faroe Islands, and on the whole Scandinavian seaboard. The early voyagers found either the same or a closely allied species, in immense numbers, on all the coasts and islands of Newfoundland. The value of its flesh and its oil made it one of the most important resources of the inhabitants of those sterile regions, and it was naturally an object of keen pursuit. It is supposed to be now completely extinct, and few museums can show even its skeleton. There seems to be strong reason to believe that modern civilization is guiltless of one or two sins of extermination which have been committed in recent ages. Now Zealand formerly possessed several species of dinornis, one of which, called moa by the islanders, was larger than the ostrich. The condition in which the bones of these birds have been found and the traditions of the natives concur to prove that, though the aborigines had probably extirpated them before the discovery of New Zealand by the whites, they still existed at a comparatively late period. The same remarks apply to a winged giant the eggs of which have been brought from Madagascar. This bird must have much exceeded the dimensions of the moa, at least so far as we can judge from the egg, which is eight times as large as the average size of the ostrich egg, or about one hundred and fifty times that of the hen.

But though we have no evidence that man has exterminated many species of birds, we know that his persecutions have caused their disappearance from many localities where they once were common, and greatly diminished their numbers in others. The cappercailzie, Tetrao urogallus, the finest of the grouse family, formerly abundant in Scotland, had become extinct in Great Britain, but has been reintroduced from Sweden. [Footnote: Thecappercailzie, or tjader, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Laestadius frequently notices the tjader, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders. The tjader, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Laestadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, towards the mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea."--Petrus Laestadius, Journal of forsta aret, etc., p. 325.]

The ostrich is mentioned, by many old travellers, as common on the Isthmus of Suez down to the middle of the seventeenth century. It appears to have frequented Palestine, Syria, and even Asia Minor at earlier periods, but is now rarely found except in the seclusion of remoter deserts. [Footnote: Frescobaldi saw ostriches between Suez and Mt. Sinai. Viaggio in Terra Santa, p. 65. See also Vansler, Voyage d'Egypte, p. 103, and an article in Petermann, Mittheilungen, 1870, p. 880, entitled Die Verbreitung des Straussee in Asien.]

The modern increased facilities of transportation have brought distant markets within reach of the professional hunter, and thereby given a new impulse to his destructive propensities. Not only do all Great Britain and Ireland contribute to the supply of game for the British capital, but the canvas-back duck of the Potomac, and even the prairie hen from the basin of the Mississippi, may be found at the stalls of the London poulterer. Kohl [Footnote: Die Herzogthumer Schleswig und Holstein, i., p. 203.] informs us that, on the coasts of the North Sea, twenty thousand wild ducks are usually taken in the course of the season in a single decoy, and sent to the large maritime towns for sale. The statistics of the great European cities show a prodigious consumption of game-birds, but the official returns fall far below the truth, because they do not include the rural districts, and because neither the poacher nor his customers report the number of his victims. Reproduction, in cultivated countries, cannot keep pace with this excessive destruction, and there is no doubt that all the wild birds which are chased for their flesh or their plumage are diminishing with a rapidity which justifies the fear that the last of them will soon follow the dodo and the wingless auk.

Fortunately the larger birds which are pursued for their flesh or for their feathers, and those the eggs of which are used as food, are, so far as we know the functions appointed to them by nature, not otherwise specially useful to man, and, therefore, their wholesale destruction is an economical evil only in the same sense in which all waste of productive capital is an evil. [Footnote: The increased demand for animal oils for the use of the leather-dresses is now threatening the penguin with the fate of the wingless auk. According to the Report of the Agricultural Department of the U. S. for August and September, 1871, p. 840, small vessels are fitted out for the chase of this bird, and return from a six week's cruise with 25,000 or 30,000 gallons of oil. About eleven birds are required for a gallon, and consequently the vessels take upon an average 800,000 penguins each.]

If it were possible to confine the consumption of game-fowl to a number equal to the annual increase, the world would be a gainer, but not to the same extent as it would be by checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the smaller birds, which are of no real value as food, but which, as we have seen, render a most important service by battling, in our behalf, as well as in their own, against the countless legions of humming and of creeping things, with which the prolific powers of insect life would otherwise cover the earth.

Utility and Destruction of Reptiles.

The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and perhaps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. Nevertheless, snakes as well as lizards and other reptiles are not wholly useless to their great enemy. The most formidable foes of the insect, and even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches the swift and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the warm countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which they both surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, and consume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier metamorphoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as upon mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other snakes.

In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few dangerous enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals prey upon them. [Footnote: It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed enmity is wholly imaginary. It is however affirmed in an article in Nature, June 11, 1872, p. 215, that the pigs have exterminated the rattlesnake in some parts of Oregon, and that swine are destructive to the cobra de capello in India. Observing that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something from their nests and dropped it upon the ground about as often they brought food to their young, I watched their proceedings, and found every day lying near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and, in a few cases, small lizards, which had, in every Instance, lost about two inches of the tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and threw away the remainder.] It is doubtful whether any species of serpent has been exterminated within the human period, and even the dense population of China has not been able completely to rid itself of the viper. They have, however, almost entirely disappeared from particular localities. The rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large districts where it was extremely common half a century ago, and Palestine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous serpents, at least very nearly so. [Footnote: Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his time. In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the multiplication of serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely rare, if at all known, in that country. I have, however, been assured by persons very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from the bite of snakes had occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at other places on the southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In Egypt, on the other hand, the cobra, the asp, and the cerastes are as numerous as ever, and are much dreaded by all the natives except the professional snake charmers.

The recent great multiplication of vipers in some parts of France is a singular and startling fact. Toussenel, quoting from official documents, states, that upon the offer of a reward of fifty centimes, or ten cents, a head, TWELVE THOUSAND vipers were brought to the prefect of a single department, and that in 1850 fifteen hundred snakes and twenty quarts of snakes' eggs were found under a farm-house hearthstone. The granary, the stables, the roof, the very beds swarmed with serpents, and the family were obliged to abandon its habitation. Dr. Viaugrandmarais, of Nantes, reported to the prefect of his department more than two hundred recent cases of viper bites, twenty-four of which proved fatal.--Tristia, p. 176 et seqq. According to the Journal del Debats for Oct. 1st, 1867, the Department of the Cote d'Or paid in the year 1866 eighteen thousand francs for the destruction of vipers. The reward was thirty centimes a head, and consequently the number killed was about sixty thousand. A friend residing in that department informs me that it was strongly suspected that many of these snakes were imported from other departments for the sake of the premium.

In Nature for 1870 and 1871 we are told that the number of deaths from the bites of venomous serpents in the Bengal Presidency, in the year 1869, was 11,416, and that in the whole of British India not less than 40,000 human lives are annually lost from this cause. In one small department, a reward of from three to six pence a head for poisonous serpents brought in 1,200 a day, and in two months the government paid L10,000 sterling for their destruction.] The serpent does not appear to have any natural limit of growth, and we are therefore not authorized wholly to discredit the evidence of ancient naturalists in regard to the extraordinary dimensions which those reptiles are said by them to have sometimes attained. The use of firearms has enabled man to reduce the numbers of the larger serpents, and they do not often escape him long enough to arrive at the size ascribed to them by travellers a century or two ago. Captain Speke, however, shot a serpent in Africa which measured fifty-one and a half feet in length.

Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger organisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous machine, and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of the mosquito, and perhaps oven of the tzetze-fly, as Toussenel and Michelet have framed in behalf of the bird. The silkworm, the lac insect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recognize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay habiliments of the holiday groups beneath them.

These humble forms of being are seldom conspicuous by more mass, and though the winds and the waters sometimes sweep together large heaps of locusts and even of may-flies, their remains are speedily decomposed, their exuviae and their structures form no strata, and still less does nature use them, as she does the calcareous and silicious cases and dwellings of animalcular species, to build reefs and spread out submarine deposits, which subsequent geological action may convert into islands and even mountains. [Footnote: Although the remains of extant animals are rarely, if ever, gathered In sufficient quantities to possess any geographical importance by their mere mass, the decayed exuviae of even the smaller and humbler forms of life are sometimes abundant enough to exercise a perceptible influence on soil and atmosphere. "The plain of Cumana," saya Humboldt, "presents a remarkable phenomenon, after heavy rains. The moistened earth, when heated by the rays of the sun, diffuses the musky odor common in the torrid zone to animals of very different classes, to the jaguar, the small species of tiger-cat, the cabiai, the gallinazo vulture, the crocodile, the viper, and the rattlesnake. The gaseous emanations, the vehicles of this aroma, appear to be disengaged in proportion as the soil, which contains the remains of an innumerable multitude of reptiles, worms, and insects, begins to be impregnated with water. Wherever we stir the earth, we are struck with the mass of organic substances which in turn are developed and become transformed or decomposed. Nature in these climes seems more active, more prolific, and, so to speak, more prodigal of life."]

But the action of the creeping and swarming things of the earth, though often passed unnoticed, is not without important effects in the general economy of nature. The geographical importance of insects proper, as well as of worms, depends principally on their connection with vegetable life as agents of its fecundation, and of its destruction. We learn from Darwin, "On Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilized by Insects," that some six thousand species of orchids are absolutely dependent upon the agency of insects for their fertilization, and that consequently, were those plants unvisited by insects, they would all rapidly disappear. What is true of the orchids is more or less true of many other vegetable families. [Footnote: Later observations of Darwin and other naturalists have greatly raised former estimates of the importance of insect life in the fecundation of plants, and among other remarkable discoveries it has been found that, in many cases at least, insects are necessary even to monoecious vegetables, because the male flower does not impregnate the female growing on the same stem, and the latter can be fecundated only by pollen supplied to it by insects from another plant of the same species.

"Who would ever have thought," says Preyer, "that the abundance and beauty of the pansy and of the clover were dependent upon the number of cats and owls But so it is. The clover and the pansy cannot exist without the bumble-bee, which, in search of his vegetable nectar, transports unconciously the pollen from the masculine to the feminine flower, a service which other insects perform only partially for these plants. Their existence therefore depends upon that of the bumble-bee. The mice make war upon this bee. In their fondness for honey they destroy the nest and at the same time the bee. The principal enemies of mice are cats and owls, and therefore the finest clovers and the most beautiful pansies are found near villages where cats and owls abound."--Preyer, Der Kampf um daas Dasein, p. 22. See also Delpino, Pensieri sulla biologia vegetale, and other works of the same able observer on vegetable physiology.]

We do not know the limits of this agency, and many of the insects habitually regarded as unqualified pests, may directly or indirectly perform functions as important to the most valuable plants as the services rendered by certain tribes to the orchids. I say directly or indirectly, because, besides the other arrangements of nature for chocking the undue multiplication of particular species, she has established a police among insects themselves, by which some of them keep down or promote the increase of others; for there are insects, as well as birds and beasts, of prey. The existence of an insect which fertilizes a useful vegetable may depend on that of another insect which constitutes his food in some stage of his life, and this other again may be as injurious to some plant as his destroyer is to a different species.

The ancients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang branches of the wild fig upon the domestic tree, in order that the insects which frequented the former might hasten the ripening of the cultivated fig by their punctures--or, as others suppose, might fructify it by transporting to it the pollen of the wild fruit--and this process, called caprification, is not yet entirely obsolete. [Footnote: The utility of caprification has been a good deal disputed, and it has, I believe, been generally abandoned in Italy, though still practised in Greece. See Browne, The Trees of America, p. 475, and on caprification in Kabylia, N. Bibesco, Les Kabyles du Djardjura, in Revue des Deux Mondes for April 1st, 1805, p. 580; also, Aus der Natur, vol. xxx., p. 684, and Phipson,

Utilization of Minute Life, p. 50. In some parts of Sicily, sprigs of mint, mentha pulegium, are used instead of branches of the wild for caprification. Pitre, Usi popolari Siciliani, 1871, p. 18.]

The perforations of the earthworms and of many insect larvae mechanically affect the texture of the soil and its permeability by water, and they therefore have a certain influence on the form and character of terrestrial surface. The earthworms long ago made good their title to the respect and gratitude of the farmer as well as of the angler. Their utility has been pointed out in many scientific as well as in many agricultural treatises. The following extract from an essay on this subject will answer my present purpose:

"Worms are great assistants to the drainer, and valuable aids to the fanner in keeping up the fertility of the soil. They love moist, but not wet soils; they will bore down to, but not into water; they multiply rapidly on land after drainage, and prefer a deeply-dried soil. On examining part of a field which had been deeply drained, after long-previous shallow drainage, it was found that the worms had greatly increased in number, and that their bores descended quite to the level of the pipes. Many worm-bores were large enough to receive the little finger. A piece of land near the sea, in Lincolnshire, over which the sea had broken and killed all the worms, remained sterile until the worms again inhabited it. A piece of pasture land, in which worms were in such numbers that it was thought their casts interfered too much with its produce, was rolled at night in order to destroy the worms. The result was, that the fertility of the field greatly declined, nor was it restored until they had recruited their numbers, which was aided by collecting and transporting multitudes of worms from the fields.

"The great depth into which worms will bore, and from which they push up fine fertile soil, and cast it on the surface, have been well shown by the fact that in a few years they have actually elevated the surface of fields by a largo layer of rich mould, several inches thick, thus affording nourishment to the roots of grasses, and increasing the productiveness of the soil."

It should be added that the writer quoted, and all others who have discussed the subject, have, so far as I know, overlooked one very important element in the fertilization produced by earthworms. I refer to the enrichment of the soil by their excreta during life, and by the decomposition of their remains when they die. Themanure thus furnished is as valuable as the like amount of similar animal products derived from higher organisms, and when we consider the prodigious numbers of these worms found on a single square yard of some soils, we may easily see that they furnish no insignificant contribution to the nutritive material required for the growth of plants. [Footnote: I believe there is no foundation for the supposition that earthworms attack the tuber of the potato. Some of them, especially one or two species employed by anglers as bait, if natives of the woods, are at least rare in shaded grounds, but multiply very rapidly after the soil is brought under cultivation. Forty or fifty years ago they were so scarce in the newer parts of New England, that the rustic fishermen of every village kept secret the few places where they were to be found in their neighborhood, as a professional mystery, but at present one can hardly turn over a shovelfull of rich moist soil anywhere, without unearthing several of them. A very intelligent lady, born in the woods of Northern New England, told me that, in her childhood, these worms were almost unknown in that region, though anxiously sought for by the anglers, but that they increased as the country was cleared, and at last became so numerous in some places, that the water of springs, and even of shallow wells, which had formerly been excellent, was rendered undrinkable by the quantity of dead worms that fell into them. The increase of the robin and other small birds which follow the settler when he has prepared a suitable home for them, at last checked the excessive multiplication of the worms, and abated the nuisance.]

The carnivorous and often herbivorous insects render another important service to man by consuming dead and decaying animal and vegetable matter, the decomposition of which would otherwise fill the air with effluvia noxious to health. Some of them, the grave-digger beetle, for instance, bury the small animals in which they lay their eggs, and thereby prevent the escape of the gases disengaged by putrefaction. The prodigious rapidity of development in insect life, the great numbers of the individuals in many species, and the voracity of most of them while in the larva state, justify the appellation of nature's scavengers which has been bestowed upon them, and there is very little doubt that, in warm countries, they consume a larger quantity of putrescent organic matter than the quadrupeds and birds which feed upon such aliment.

INJURY TO THE FOREST BY INSECTS.

The action of the insect on vegetation, as we have thus far described it, is principally exerted on smaller and less conspicuous plants, and it is therefore matter rather of agricultural than of geographical interest. But in the economy of the forest European writers ascribe to insect life an importance which it has not reached in America, where the spontaneous woods are protected by safeguards of nature's own devising.

The insects which damage primitive forests by feeding upon products of trees essential to their growth, are not numerous, nor is their appearance, in destructive numbers, frequent, and those which perforate the stems and branches, to deposit and hatch their eggs, more commonly select dead trees for that purpose, though, unhappily, there are important exceptions to this latter remark. [Footnote: The locust Insect, Clitus pictus, which deposits its eggs in the American locust, Robinia pseudacacia, is one of these, and its ravages have been and still are more destructive to that very valuable tree, so remarkable for combining rapidity of growth with strength and durability of wood. This insect, I believe, has not yet appeared in Europe, where, since the so general employment of the Robinia to clothe and protect embankments and the scarps of deep cuts on railroads, it would do incalculable mischief. As a traveller, however, I should find some compensation for this evil in the destruction of these acacia hedges, which as completely obstruct the view on hundreds of miles of French and Italian railways, as do the garden walls of the same countries on the ordinary roads.

The lignivorous insects that attack living trees almost uniformly confine their ravages to trees already unsound or diseased in growth from the depredations of leaf-eaters, such as caterpillars and the like, or from other causes. The decay of the tree, therefore, is the cause not the consequence of the invasions of the borer. This subject has been discussed by Perris in the Annales de la Societe Entomologique de la France for 1852, and his conclusions are confirmed by the observations of Samanos, who quotes, at some length, the views of Perris. "Having, for fifteen years," says the latter author, "incessantly studied the habits of lignivorous insects in one of the best wooded regions of France, I have observed facts enough to feel myself warranted in expressing my conclusions, which are: that insects in general--I am trees in sound health, and they assail those only whose normal conditions and functions have been by some cause impaired."

See, more fully, Samanos, Traite de la Culture du Pin Maritime, Paris, 1864, pp. 140-145, and Siemoni, Manuale dell' Arte Forestale. 2d edition. Florence, 1872.]

I do not know that we have any evidence of the destruction or serious injury of American forests by insects before or even soon after the period of colonization; but since the white man has laid bare a vast proportion of the earth's surface, and thereby produced changes favorable, perhaps, to the multiplication of these pests, they have greatly increased in numbers, and, apparently, in voracity also. Not many years ago, the pines on thousands of acres of land in North Carolina were destroyed by insects not known to have ever done serious injury to that tree before. In such cases as this and others of the like sort, there is good reason to believe that man is the indirect cause of an evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever the birds which feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipes implumis, the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowny beetle's evening drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies. [Footnote: In the artificial woods of Europe, insects are far more numerous and destructive to trees than in the primitive forests of America, and the same remark may be made of the smaller rodents, such as moles, mice, and squirrels. In the dense native wood, the ground and the air are too humid, the depth of shade too great, for many tribes of these creatures, while near the natural meadows and other open grounds, where circumstances are otherwise more favorable for their existence and multiplication, their numbers are kept down by birds, serpents, foxes, and smaller predacious quadrupeds. In civilized countries these natural enemies of the worm, the beetle, and the mole, are persecuted, sometimes almost exterminated, by man, who also removes from his plantations the decayed or wind-fallen trcea, the shrubs and underwood, which, in a state of nature, furnished food and shelter to the borer and the rodent, and often also to the animals that preyed upon them. Hence the insect and the gnawing quadruped are allowed to increase, from the expulsion of the police which, in the natural wood, prevent their excessive multiplication, and they become destructive to the forest because they are driven to the living tree for nutriment and cover. The forest of Fontainebleau is almost wholly without birds, and their absence is ascribed by some writers to the want of water, which, in the thirsty sands of that wood, does not gather into running brooks; but the want of undergrowth is perhaps an equally good reason for their scarcity.

On the other hand, the thinning out of the forest and the removal of underwood and decayed timber, by which it is brought more nearly to the condition of an artificial wood, is often destructive to insect tribes which, though not injurious to trees, are noxious to man. Thus the troublesome woodtick, formerly very abundant in the North Eastern, as it unhappily still is in native forests in the Southern and Western States, has become nearly or quite extinct in the former region since the woods have been reduced in extent and laid more open to the sun and air.--Asa Fitch, in Report of New York Agricultural Society for 1870, pp. 868,864.]

Introduction of Insects.