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Updated: June 22, 2025
My claim is that the bad tenement house in Boston, as everywhere else where people are herded together in crowded filthy quarters, where sanitary laws are neglected or defied either by landlords or tenants, or both, furnishes a breeding-place for the microbes of nearly every sin and vice that infest our modern society.
Every spring a few individuals of this species make their appearance in Hyde Park, and settle there for the season, in full sight of the fashionable world; for their breeding-place happens to be that minute transcript of nature midway between the Dell and Rotten Row, where a small bed of rushes and aquatic grasses flourishes in the stagnant pool forming the end of the Serpentine.
The insularity of their citadel has worked in the same direction, by focussing their interests upon the purely human. That inland sea, again: were it not an ideal breeding-place for shell-fish, the Tarentines would long ago have learnt to vary their diet. Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical tone of a people.
On the return of Spring the birds do not migrate in a body, but slip away, flock by flock, to reappear about the end of April in their old breeding-place in the North Country, with, perhaps, the loss of a few members the one that was old and died in the season of scarcity; and one that was taken at the roost by a brown owl, and one that had its feet frozen to the perch; and was killed by a jackdaw when struggling to free itself; and one that was struck down by a sparrow-hawk on his homeward journey.
Thirty miles south of Gaspé is the little town of Perce, also a fishing-station. Near this stands a rock of red sandstone, five hundred feet long and three hundred high, with an open arch leading through it, under which a boat can pass. It stands a mile from the shore in deep water, and its top affords a secure breeding-place for hundreds of sea-fowl.
It was not easy to understand why, because these islands were noted as a breeding-place for the humpbacked whale. Yet for years they had not been fished, so that a plausible explanation of the paucity of their numbers as a consequence of much harassing could not be reasonably offered.
I have been informed that this breeding-place has been deserted for several years, owing to the settlements having approached too near to please the winged possessors. This satisfactorily accounts for the decrease I have noticed amongst these feathered denizens of the forest, during the last seven or eight years.
The settlement, composed of mean hovels, with a few large structures of mud, or plastered wattle, thatched with palm leaves, was surrounded by water, marsh, and forest, the breeding-place of myriads of croaking frogs and of clouds of mosquitoes; even to one in perfect health existence in such a place would have been a burden.
In Herm and Jethou there are also a few Choughs, but Jackdaws are the more numerous in both Islands. No Choughs appear to inhabit the small rocky islets to the northward of Herm, though some of them appear to be large enough to afford a breeding-place for either Choughs or Jackdaws, but neither of these birds seem to have taken possession of them; probably want of food is the occasion of this. Mr.
Finally, most consoling of all, it was discovered that, while the ordinary Culex mosquito can breed, going through all the stages from the egg to the complete insect, in about fourteen days, so that any puddle which will remain wet for that length of time, or even such exceedingly temporary collections of water as the rain caught in a tomato-can, in an old rubber boot, in broken crockery, etc., will serve her for a breeding-place, the Anopheles on the other hand takes nearly three months for the completion of her development.
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