Bees, Pigeons, Rabbits, and the Canary Bird, Familiarly Described; Their Habits, Propensities, and Dispositions Explained Mode of Treatment in Health ... Adapted as a Text-Book for the Young Student - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1842 Excerpt: ... in veneration, as the harbingers, or the emblems, of peace and love. II. Political view of the Pigeon.--A question has been raised regarding the national profit, or loss, which might arise from encouraging an extensive breed of Pigeons. On this point, both agriculturists, men of science, and amateurs, have differed in opinion, but it will be found, that no respectable antagonist to their partial propagation has appeared. We must confess, however, that Mr. Duharnel, the apologist for the Dove tribes, has not been a very successful advocate. He avers, that pigeons do not feed upon green corn--that their bills have not sufficient power to dig for seeds in the earth, and that they only pick up scattered grains, which would else be wasted, or become the prey of other birds. From the season of the corn appearing, he says, pigeons subsist principally upon the seeds of weeds, the multiplication and spread of which they must, in consequence, greatly prevent. Another writer has of late introduced a story of the farmers in a certain district in England, who, finding their corn and pulse crops greatly reduced, attributed it to the vast quantity of pigeons kept among them, which, on this account, by a general resolution, they agreed to destroy. A few seasons afterwards, it seems they found their lands so exhausted, and their crops so overrun with weeds, that they came to a general wish for their pigeons back again. "Now," says Mowbray, " this is either a lame story, or the farmers implicated were very lame farmers, if they did not know how to weed their land, without the assistance of agents the use of which must cost them so considerable a part of their crops." Last year, a farmer in Kent shot a wood-pigeon, from the crop of which he extracted nine hundred and twenty-...

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