862 MEANS OF DISPERSAL. 



assume that under such circumstances their rate of flight 

 would often be thirty-five miles an hour ; and some authors 

 have given a far higher estimate. I have never seen an 

 instance of nutritious seeds passing through the intestines 

 of a bird; but hard seeds of fruit pass uninjured through 

 even the digestive organs of a turkey. In the course of two 

 months, I picked up in my garden twelve kinds of seeds, 

 out of the excrement of small birds, and these seemed per- 

 fect, and some of them, which were tried, germinated. But 

 the following fact is more important : the crops of birds do 

 not secrete gastric juice, and do not, as I know by trial, 

 injure in the least the germination of seeds ; now, after a bird 

 has found and devoured a large supply of food, it is posi- 

 tively asserted that all the grains do not pass into the gizzard 

 for twelve or even eighteen hours. A bird in this interval 

 might easily be blown to the distance of five hundred miles, 

 and hawks are known to look out for tired birds, and the 

 contents of their torn crops might thus readily get scattered. 

 Some hawks and owls bolt their prey whole, and, after an. 

 interval of from twelve to twenty hours, disgorge pellets, 

 which, as I know from experiment made in the Zoological 

 Gardens, include seeds capable of germination. Some seeds 

 of the oat, wheat, millet, canary, hemp, clover, and beet 

 germinated after having been from twelve to twenty-one 

 hours in the stomachs of different birds of prey ; and two 

 seeds of beet grew after having been thus retained for two 

 days and fourteen hours. Fresh-water fish, I find, eat seeds 

 of many land and water plants ; fish are frequently devoured 

 by birds, and thus the seeds might be transported from 

 place to place. I forced many kinds of seeds into the 

 stomachs of dead fish, and then gave their bodies to fishing- 

 eagles, storks and pelicans ; these birds, after an interval of 

 many hours, either rejected the seeds in pellets or passed 

 them in their excrement ; and several of these seeds retained 

 the power of germination. Certain seeds, however, were 

 always killed by this process. 



Locusts are sometimes blown to great distances from the 

 land. I myself caught one 370 miles from the coast of 

 Africa, and have heard of others caught at greater distances. 

 The Rev. R. T. Lowe informed Sir C. Lyell that in Novem- 

 ber, 1844, swarms of locusts visited the island of Madeira. 

 They were in countless numbers, as thick as the flakes of 

 snow in the heaviest snowstorm, and extended upward as far 

 as could be seen with a telescope. During two or three 



