ELMS AND SPARROWS.
If we were asked what tree and what bird were the toughest, the most irrepressible, the least vulnerable, we should answer the elm and the house sparrow. Yet within the year, which has been singularly healthy and good for plant and animal, mortal diseases have for the first time attacked these two standards. The elm disease, which is fungoid, kills the tree only Iess surely than the fungus which wiped out the chestnut in some regions of America. There seems to be real grounds for fear of its extension, and everyone is asked to report any sick elm. The sparrow malady, _which has appeared only in the Shetlands, appears to be singularly fatal, but its nature has not yet been diagnosed. One would expect the thinly populated islands lying off our coast to be singularly healthy ; but they are not. Sheep cannot live, or, at any rate, do not flourish in Skye in the Winter ; and even the poorer people living permanently in such places are prone to maladies, especially associated in many minds with an over-industrialized civilization.
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