Without this
provision one favourite district would be crowded with inhabitants,
while others would be destitute and forsaken. But the parent birds
seem to maintain a jealous superiority, and to oblige the young to
seek for new abodes: and the rivalry of the males, in many kinds,
prevents their crowding the one on the other. Whether the
swallows and house-martins return in the same exact number
annually is not easy to say, for reasons given above: but it is
apparent, as I have remarked before in my Monographies, that the
numbers returning bear no manner of proportion to the numbers
retiring.
Letter XL
To The Honourable Daines Barrington
Selborne, June 2, 1778.
Dear Sir,
The standing objection to botany has always been, that it is a
pursuit that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without
improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge: and where
the science is carried no farther than a mere systematic
classification, the charge is but too true. But the botanist that is
desirous of wiping off this aspersion should be by no means
content with a list of names; he should study plants
philosophically, should investigate the laws of vegetation, should
examine the powers and virtues of efficacious herbs, should
promote their cultivation; and graft the gardener, the planter, and
the husbandman, on the phytologist.
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