=Birds as Pest Destroyers.=--The French journal, _Le Chasseur_, puts in a plea for the animals that should not be killed. "Why destroy spiders, except in rooms, while they check the increase of flies? Why tread on the cricket in the garden, which wars upon caterpillars, snails, and grubs? Why kill the inoffensive slowworm, which eats grasshoppers? Why slay the cuckoo, whose favorite food is the caterpillar, which we do not like to touch? Why destroy the nuthatch and de-nest the warbler, foes of wasps? Why make war on sparrows, which eat seeds only when they can not get insects, and which exterminate so many grain-eating insects? Why burn powder against starlings, which pass their lives in eating larvæ and picking vermin from the cattle in the fields? (But they eat grapes too.) Why destroy the ladybird, which feeds on aphides? Why lay snares for titmice, when each pair take on an average one hundred and twenty thousand worms and insects for their little ones? Why kill the toad, which eats snails, weevils, and ants? Why save the lives of thousands of gnats by destroying goat-suckers? Why kill the bat, which makes war on night moths and many bugs, as swallows do on flies? Why destroy the shrew mole, which lives on earthworms, as the mouse does on wheat? Why say the screech owl eats pigeons and chickens, when it is not true, and why destroy it when it takes the place of seven or eight cats by eating at least six thousand mice a year?"
=The Yang-tse-Kiang.=--In a lecture before the London Foreign Press Association Mrs. Isabella Bishop describes the Yank-tse-Kiang as one of the largest rivers of the world, it draining an area of 650,000 square miles, within which dwell a population of 180,000,000. In the journey to the far East, the scenery at Szu-chuan changed from savage grandeur and endless surprises to the fairest scenes, with prosperity, peace, law, and order seeming to prevail everywhere. Erroneous ideas were often entertained about Chinese social life and surroundings. China had many trade associations, which were often strengthened by alliance with guilds. They were composed of men in any particular trade or employment, who bound themselves for common action in the interest of that trade. They might rightly be called trade unions, for through their elected officers they prescribed hours of labor and minimum wages and made trade rules, the breach of which was punishable by fine and expulsion. The Chinese people displayed much benevolence and social kindness one to another, and had societies for providing free coffins and seemly burial in free cemeteries for the poor, soup kitchens, foundling institutions, asylums, orphanages, and medical dispensaries. Throughout the whole of the Yang-tse basin the author was impressed with the completeness of Chinese social and commercial organization by the existence of patriotism or public spirit, by great prosperity, and by the absence of the decay often attributed to the nation. Of the prevailing "expansion" or territorial robbery fever Mrs. Bishop said that we were coming to think only of markets and territories, and to ignore human beings, and were breaking up, in the case of a fourth of the human race, the most ancient of the earth's existing civilizations without giving for our supposed advantage a fair equivalent.