On the Continent, and especially in Italy, the comparative scarcity and dearness of animal food combine with the feeling I have just mentioned to stimulate still further the destructive passions of the fowler. In the Tuscan province of Grosseto, containing less than 2,000 square miles, nearly 300,000 thrushes and other small birds are annually brought to market. [Footnote: Salvagnoli, Memorie sulle Maremme Toscane, p. 143. The country about Naples is filled with slender towers fifteen or twenty feet high, which are a standing puzzle to strangers. They are the stations of the fowlers who watch from them the flocks of small birds and drive them down into the nets by throwing stones over them. In Northern and Central Italy, one often sees hillocks crowned with grove-like plantations of small trees, much resembling large arbors. These serve to collect birds, which are entrapped in nets in great numbers. These plantatious are called ragnaje, and the reader will find, in Bindi's edition of Davanzati, a very pleasant description of a ragnaja, though its authorship is not now ascribed to that eminent writer. Tschudi has collected in his little work, Ueber die Landwirthschaftliche Bedeutung der Vogel, many interesting facts respecting the utility of birds, and, the wanton destruction of them in Italy and elsewhere. Not only the owl, but many other birds more familiarly known as predacious in their habits, are useful by destroying great numbers of mice and moles. The importance of this last service becomes strikingly apparent when it is known that the burrows of the moles are among the most frequent causes of rupture in the dikes of the Po, and, consequently, of inundations which lay many square miles of land under water. See Annales des Ponts et Chaussees, 1847, 1 semestre, p. 150; VOGT, Nutzliche und schadliche Thiere; and particularly articles in the Giornale del Club Alpino, vol. iv., no. 15, and vol. v., no. 16. See also in Aus der Natur, vol. 54, p. 707, an article entitled Nutzen der Vogel fur die Landwirthschaft, where it is affirmed that "without birds no agriculture or even vegetation would be possible." In an interesting memoir by Rondani, published in the Bolletino del Comizio agrario di Parma for December, 1868, it is maintained that birds are often injurious to the agriculturist, by preying not only on noxious insects, but sometimes exclusively, or at least by preference, on entomophagous tribes which would otherwise destroy those injurious to cultivated plants. See also articles by Prof. Sabbioni in the Giornale di Agricoltura di Bologna, November and December, 1870, and other articles in the same journal of 15th and 30th April, 1870.]