PREFACE.
In offering this little volume to the public, the author feels confident that it will meet with a cordial reception from those who have neither the leisure nor the patience to make such investigations as a work like the present requires. In view of the many heated discussions which the sparrow has produced in this country, tending to show its general usefulness, or wholesale destructiveness, a careful and critical survey of its life-history, detailing the minutest particulars thereof, cannot fail to awaken attention and to command respect. A desire to know the subject in all its bearings, must certainly be of paramount importance. Agriculturists and fruit-growers, mainly of all others, will certainly reap the first fruits of such knowledge. The facts, which the writer has gleaned from various fields of observation, but largely from his own, at infinite pains and expense, subserve, in the highest degree, the interests of humanity, and should not be carelessly set aside or lightly considered.
With the disappearance of our highly insectivorous native species before the rapid and insolent advances of their hardy foreign brother, and the consequent multiplication of insect foes, must come the destruction of vegetation and the entailment of untold misery upon man and beast. The sparrow itself, by reason of its almost exclusive grain-eating habits, will
