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the roads; in February, March, April, and May it is much the same—corn, mingled with seeds, buds of gooseberries, young tops of peas, turnip and hay-seed, &c.; in June corn, peas and seeds of various sorts; in July and August ditto. After that they mix the corn with considerable quantities of wild seeds, including, be it freely admitted, the destructive knot-grass and corn-bindweed; but even then they take corn by preference.
I do not think Mr. Morris can have noticed this table, or he would hardly say what he does.
Neither would he say that Sparrows have done as much good as harm in America since their introduction[1] ('Sparrow-Shooter,' p. 5) if he had read what our American cousins of late years have written about them. On this head let me merely draw his attention to what Dr. Elliott Coues says at page 52 of Mr. Wesley's book, which is only a sample of a hundred other testimonies to the detestation in which they are now held in the United States,—and to a Report on the subject by a Committee of the American Ornithologists' Union, published last year, and reprinted, though not in extenso, in Miss Ormerod's 'Ninth Report on Injurious Insects'[2]. The Committee's Report may be seen in the 'Forest and Stream' newspaper of August 6, 1885[3]. It is impossible, in my humble judgment, for any one to read the testimony therein contained and think that Sparrows have done good in the United States.
- ↑ Into Maine in 1858 (Gentry's 'House-Sparrow,' p. 33).
- ↑ Mr. Morris is not very complimentary to Miss Ormerod, whose efforts to sift the matter in an impartial spirit deserve different recognition.
- ↑ A copy of which any one interested in the matter will find at the library of the Zoological Society in Hanover Square.
