This food, carefully examined (as in all cases, with a lens), was found to be corn, milky, green, and ripe, and sometimes green peas from my garden; only two small insects were found in the whole number. The food in them has been much the same every year. Examining the old birds, however, is not test enough, as they eat very few insects anywhere; but if any were the peculiar prey of sparrows, they would be found in quantity in any young ones bred about my place. To test this, when a pair or two of sparrows, as happens most years, contrive, by keeping clear of the buildings, to escape being shot long enough to build a nest and hatch young ones, these have been taken (by choice when about half-grown), and the food in them carefully examined. It has varied greatly, but certainly there were not more insects among it, I think less, than there usually are where sparrows abound. In the only nest known of one year, the food in the four young ones was chiefly green peas, with some grains of green wheat, one small beetle, and some half-dozen small insects of species unknown to me. In the only nest the following year the young ones had little in them except corn—old wheat, if I remember rightly. Some broods have contained small beetles (which, mostly soft ones, I have found in sparrows old and young, from all sorts of places, oftener than caterpillars) and a few wild seeds. One brood had a mixture of beetles and ripe wheat. One grasshopper's leg and a very few pieces of earwigs have also been found. Of caterpillars, said to be kept down by sparrows, only two small ones in eight callow birds, from two nests taken at the same time, have been found in all the years that these nestlings have been examined, and no trace of an aphis. The absence of caterpillars is the only difference that I have noticed in
