cut-worms, etc 19 "
Diptera--Flies 8 "
Coleoptera--Beetles 61 "
Hymenoptera--Ants, wasps, slugs 8 "
Other insects 6 "
---
Total 145 "

* * * * *

[Illustration: THE BOB-WHITE
For the Smaller Pests of the Farm, This Bird is the Most
Marvelous Engine of Destruction Ever put Together of Flesh and Blood.]

_A few sample meals of insects_.--The following are records of single
individual meals of the bob white:

Of grasshoppers, 84; chinch bugs, 100; squash bugs, 12; army worm, 12;
cut-worm, 12; mosquitoes, 568 in three hours; cotton boll weevil, 47;
flies, 1,350; rose slugs, 1,286. Miscellaneous insects consumed by a
laying hen quail, 1,532, of which 1,000 were grasshoppers; total weigh
of the lot, 24.6 grams.

"F.M. Howard, of Beeville, Texas, wrote to the U.S. Bureau of
Entomology, that the bob whites shot in his vicinity had their crops
filled with the weevils. Another farmer reported his cotton fields full
of quail, and an entire absence of weevils." Texas and Georgia papers
(please copy.)

And yet, because of its few pitiful ounces of flesh, two million gunners
and ten thousand lawmakers think of the quail _only as a bird that can
be shot and eaten!_ Throughout a great portion of its former range,
including New York and New Jersey, the species is surely and certainly
on the verge of _total extinction_. And yet sportsmen gravely discuss
the "bag limit," and "enforcement of the bag-limit law" as a means of
bringing back this almost vanished species! Such folly in grown men is
very trying.

_To my friend, the Epicure_:--The next time you regale a good appetite
with blue points, terrapin stew, filet of sole and saddle of mutton,
touched up here and there with the high lights of rare old sherry, rich
claret and dry monopole, pause as the dead quail is laid before you, on
a funeral pyre of toast, and consider this: "Here lies the charred
remains of the Farmer's Ally and Friend, poor Bob White. In life he
devoured 145 different kinds of bad insects, and the seeds of 129
anathema weeds. For the smaller pests of the farm, he was the most
marvelous engine of destruction that God ever put together of flesh and
blood. He was good, beautiful and