At Marion, Ohio, members of the gun clubs organized and began the destruction of the sparrows, and with what success is not recorded. On December 13th the Pennsylvania State Grange Patrons of Husbandry recommended that a State bounty of two and one half cents each be placed on English sparrows. Other movements in this direction, which have been adopted by States, have been mentioned in previous reports. The extermination of the sparrow is a matter for the individual. He should learn their habits; break up their nests; confuse their hiding places, and make the bird an outlaw. More emphatic words would be used if there were command of them, than have been heretofore written, in condemnation of the English sparrow. It is the pest of England and half of Europe. In less than a quarter of a century it is the plague of half the Atlantic coast and the abomination of half the cities of America. It has been said that the destruction of crops by the Rocky Mountain locust is not worthy of mention in comparison with the disaster wrought by this devastating enemy. The grasshopper lays waste an immense region, and like a sorocco removes all signs of vegetable life and leaves a desert of nakedness and bareness and despair. He is carried by the wind beyond the limit of his power of reproduction, and dies. Millions upon millions perish, and the land has rest. Grain and grasses grow; the bareness was but temporary, for the fertile earth recovers itself. Not so with the hateful sparrow. One sparrow may die, but he leaves behind a brood of offspring which multiply almost as rapidly as the lice of Egypt. The streets of the city do not afford this scavenger with food, and he straightway seeks the fields of grain, the orchards of fruit, and destroys and continues destroying. Millions of them soon will be everywhere where they can find food as a prey, can increase and multiply. All seasons, climes, conditions are the same to them. Rains drown out the chinch-bug; atmospheric influences check the Mountain locust, so that beyond a certain meridian he may not propagate his species; the Colorado potato-beetle finds his insect enemies; finds certain birds which will devour him (among which is not the sparrow); finds in his migrations from west to east a luxuriance of growth that gives him food far away from his native habitat; he finds the art of man with his poisons and his apparatus for applying them, his worthy foe. But the English sparrow grows, thrives and multiplies everywhere. We find no enemy strong enough or intelligent enough to retard his advancing or diminish his increasing hosts.

The warning was sounded long ago. Farmers in their utter ignorance, or wantonness killed the prairie chickens, because they ate a few grains of his thousands of bushels of corn. They know not that the most useful and beautiful of all the birds of the prairie regions, fed himself and his family for months upon the dreaded army worm and multitudes of other insects injurious to the crops, and saved from loss almost incalculable. They sit idly by and see without observing an enemy that is not insectivorous, multiplying as the sands of the sea in number, which some day will swoop down on his grain fields and fruits, and side by side with the worm devour what he has planted and from which he thought to reap a harvest. The quail has been ruthlessly killed. They are among the best of all the friends of the farm. To gratify a senseless instinct of a good shot, or fill the belly with a toothsome morsel, the docile, proud, sprightly quail must die. The glad note of the "Bob White" is the signal for a quick rush for a murderous gun. The best friend is sacrificed, and the infernal sparrow, with its monotonous chirp, grows on and grows ever, spreading from the city to the country, and laying tribute on every field and orchard, supplementing in his voracity the destructiveness of every hateful worm and caterpillar and bug of the earth.