THE DOVE COTE AND THE AVIARY: BEING SKETCHES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF PIGEONS AND OTHER ΤΟ THE EARL OF DERBY, PRESIDENT OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON, ETC., ETC., ETC., WHOSE DISTINGUISHED AID TO ZOOLOGY HAS BEEN SO LIBERAL, CONTINUOUS, AND EFFICIENT, THE PRESENT VOLUME IS, BY PERMISSION, DEDICATED, BY HIS LORDSHIP'S RESPECTFUL AND OBLIGED SERVANT, THE AUTHOR. ADVERTISEMENT. THE researches requisite to complete the volume on Ornamental and Domestic Poultry" naturally put the writer in possession of many a clue towards the better understanding of the natures of other domestic, captive, and familiar birds. The following pages may therefore be looked upon as an almost necessary sequel to the former work. The object has been to ascertain the place which certain genera and species are likely eventually to take, in respect to their association with mankind, and to obtain a cognizance of the circumstances most immediately connected with that relationship. The writer is fully aware that it is not easy for him to answer and explain several of the objections that may be urged against the theoretical views he has ventured to state; but he is also both extensively read and practically experienced in the still greater difficulties and inconsistencies of the progressive hypothesis of domesticated creatures. What zoology, in its subservience to the requirements of man, now wants, is a series of widely-extended experiments: unknown zoological capabilities, and the results of untried zoological combinations are, at the present date, as little to be guessed at as were those of chemistry a hundred years |