f half
flying, with his hind feet fastened to the velvet pedestal, or sitting
upon his haunches with a nut between his fore paws. The squirrel's
main concern seems to be to prevent the undue extension of the
nut-bearing trees--an office man has already well taken upon
himself--and besides, he destroys fruit, injures trees, and is a great
enemy of birds. His gradual extinction would be tolerated by a
civilized nation.

All these things may take the hues of the rainbow and are capable of
infinite variety of arrangement. There certainly seems to be no good
reason why in a few years some combination of them may not be
considered as effective as a row of dead humming birds. The world may
be saved in this way from presenting a spectacle that should excite
the pity of gods and men--the spectacle of the destruction of one of
the most beautiful, the most harmless, and the most useful classes of
creation, at the command of the senseless whims of fashion.

Then, too, the sportsmen's guns and the small boys' slings and
shooters of various sorts are constantly bringing down numbers of the
feathered songsters. In many parts of our country men and boys roam
the fields, shooting at every bird they see, and their action is
tacitly approved by the community. This survival of the barbarous
instinct to kill is condoned as "sport." If these people were to spend
this time in following the birds with opera glass and notebook to
study them, they might not be so readily understood--they might even
be taken for mild lunatics, so utterly is public sentiment perverted
on this subject.

A little consideration shows this destruction to be more disastrous
than at first appears. According to the latest biological science,
every species of animals must have long ago reached the limit beyond
which it could not greatly increase its numbers. However great its
tendency to increase might be, its natural obstacles and enemies
would increase in like proportions till at last the two would balance
each other, and there could be no further increase in the number of
individuals of that species. All classes of animals in a state of
nature must have reached this balanced condition generations ago. This
is true of the birds. Their natural enemies are capable of preventing
their increase; that is, they can and do destroy every year as many as
are hatched that year. Now if man be added as a new destructive
agency, the old enemies, being still able to destroy as ma