GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 325 



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 12 kinds of seeds ; 

 out of the excrement of small birds, and these seemed 

 perfect, and some of them, which 1 tried, germinated. 

 But the following fact is more important : the crops of 

 birds do not secrete gastric juice, and do not in the 

 least injure, as I know by trial, the germination of 

 seeds ; now after a bird has found and devoured a large 

 supply of food, it is positively asserted that all the grains 

 do not pass into the gizzard for 12 or even 18 hours. 

 A bird in this interval might easily be blown to the 

 distance of 500 miles, and hawks are known to look 

 out for tired birds, and the contents of their torn crops 

 might thus readily get scattered. Mr. Brent informs me 

 that a friend of his had to give up flying carrier-pigeons 

 from France to England, as the hawks on the English 

 coast destroyed so many on their arrival. 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 experiments 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 oi 

 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, 

 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 pas- 

 them in their excrement ; and several of these seed* 

 retained their power of germination. Certain seeds, 

 however, were always killed by this process. 



