red and white currants, he is, as Buffon says, a
veritable, though by no means an idle, glutton.
Not being a farmer I cannot state from
experience the damage he does to the ripening
corn; but the French naturalist calculated that
it would require twenty pounds of grain to
keep a pair of sparrows for a year. This
calculation presupposes that the birds should be
kept in captivity, and fed with nothing else
but corn; whereas the sparrow in his wild
state is as omnivorous as man, and neither
disdains fish, flesh, nor fowl, that has undergone
the process of cooking; to say nothing of the
living prey in the shape of worms, slugs,
caterpillars, flies, moths, and butterflies, which
when he can get them he is glad to make
a meal of for himself, or distribute among
his young ones. The farmers, as most people
know, have a great objection to sparrows. In
some parts of the country they enrol
themselves into sparrow-clubs, for the purpose of
exterminating these busy depredators, and in
most parts of the country they employ small
boys or young lads in the corn-fields to frighten
them away, either by shouts or cries, or by the
more effectual discharge of firearms. But the
farmers are wrong in this matter; and the
sparrow, thief though he be, is their benefactor.

Honest old Bewick, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
an excellent naturalist as well as an artist, says
upon this subject:

"Most of the smaller birds are supported,
especially when young, by a profusion of
caterpillars, small worms, and insects; on these they
feed, and thus tiiey contribute to preserve the
vegetable world from destruction. This is
contrary to the commonly received opinion that
birds, particularly sparrows, do much mischief
in destroying the labours of the gardener and
husbandman. It has been observed 'that a
single pair of sparrows, during the time they are
feeding their young, will destroy about four
thousand caterpillars weekly!' They likewise
feed their young with butterflies and other
winged insects, each of which, if not destroyed
in this manner, would be productive of several
hundreds of caterpillars. Let us not condemn
a whole species of animals because, in some
instances, we have found them troublesome or
inconvenient. Of this we are sufficiently
sensible, but the uses to which they are subservient
in the grand economical distribution of nature,
we cannot so easily ascertain. We have already
observed that, in the destruction of caterpillars,
sparrows are eminently serviceable to vegetation,
and in this respect alone, there is reason to
suppose, sufficiently repay the destruction they
make in the produce of the garden and the
field."

In the United States of America and Canada,
where there are no sparrows—and where few
small birds can live unless in the wilderness—
partly from the fact that every small boy from
the age of eleven upwards is allowed to carry a
gun, and blaze away at everything with wings,
bigger than a butterfly or a humming bird, that
comes within range of his weapon, the plague
of caterpillars, especially of that known as the
"measure worm" is beyond conception to the
dwellers in our more fortunate isles. In the
hot summers—and it should be remembered that
even the Northern States of America, enjoy (or
suffer from) a climate similar to that of Spain
or Morocco—the shade of trees is especially
agreeable, and in the principal streets of the
principal cities, the oleanthus, the elm, the maple
and other trees are planted, both for their
beauty and their utility. Unluckily the
"measure worm," a vile, disgusting, black caterpillar,
that breeds in incredible numbers, loves the
trees also, and the early leaves no sooner
expand than the "measurer" begins to disport
himself by dangling from the boughs. It has
often been proposed as a remedy for this filthy
nuisance to introduce the European sparrow to
prey upon the grubs. When the subject was
lately mooted for the hundredth time, the leading
journal of New York undertook to prove, that
even if the sparrow could be acclimatised—
which the writer seriously doubted—the cats of
New York would prove too many for it and very
speedily extirpate the foreign intruder. As,
however, there are quite as many cats in
London as in New York—perhaps ten times as
many—and the sparrow still lives and thrives
in our great city, in spite of an occasional meal
made upon him by our hungry grimalkins, the
argument of the New York editor was not
founded upon a complete appreciation of the
facts. The experiment was, and is, well worth
the trying, as it is possible that the mania
for killing such birds which besets the small
boys of America, may be far more to blame than
the murderous propensities of the cat, for the
failure that has hitherto attended all the efforts
made to introduce the sparrow to the house-
roofs of our transatlantic cousins.* This seems
the more probable, as an attempt to naturalise
the sparrow in Australia has succeeded to the
fullest degree. Mr. Edward Wilson consigned
a large number of healthy birds to Melbourne.
They were let loose immediately on arrival, and
betook themselves to the tiles and the tree-
tops; and, possibly because the little Australian
boys have not yet been entrusted with fire-
arms, or because the grimalkins—like
themselves, a recent immigration to the antipodes—
looked with as little concern upon sparrows in
the new country as they did in the old, they
speedily began to pair, and breed, and make
themselves at home. So greatly have they
flourished—it is to be hoped at the expense in the
first instance of the gnats and the caterpillars
—that the gardeners in the neighbourhood of
Melbourne have begun to complain, just as
gardeners and farmers foolishly do at home, of
their depredations upon the peas and cherries.

* These efforts are still in progress, and thousands
of sparrows were let loose in the city of New York
this last spring. To protect the birds against the
severity of the winter, they are provided with little
wooden houses, comically perched among the
branches of the trees.

The London sparrow, like other created