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thinking that thereby they are doing themselves some 

 wonderful good, whereas by this manoeuvre they are 

 only taking a backward step or two, and so for a time 

 neutralising those they have already taken towards the 

 desired end. But while breeders are themselves 

 being individually penalised through the agency of the 

 septic bacilli which are cultivated in the saucer of 

 soaked bread given to their "half-hardy" stock, and 

 through that of those bacilli which are also from time 

 to time imported into their aviaries from the dealer's 

 foci of infection, along with the mistakenly supposed 

 "hardy" wild specimens, these (domesticated) 

 Parrakeets, &c. by the very fact of continuing their 

 respective species in a septic environment, have 

 already begun to establish themselves as a family 

 undergoing the process of immunization. It there- 

 fore becomes a matter of personal choice to each 

 breeder whether he protects himself and his pocket by 

 preserving his birds, as far as possible, from specially 

 septic influences, or whether in a fine phrensy of 

 altruism he elects to do his infinitesimally small share 

 towards the production of a racial and hereditary 

 immunity, to be realised by posterity some hundreds of 

 years hence, by wilfully losing a large proportion of his 

 own birds every year. There is no parallel to guide 

 him between the present and the past ; for although 

 we of to-day benefit to a certain extent in the case of 

 our Canaries through the methods of our ancestors, it 

 must not be forgotten that what they did was the 

 product, not of benevolent foresight, but of sheer 

 ignorance. And we must moreover remember that if 

 we do elect to actively help towards the ultimate 

 immunization of any family or species of bird, it can 

 only be in the case of those birds that can be persuaded 

 to habitually breed generation after generation in our 

 aviaries. To wilfully help the already too destructive 

 septic organisms to play havoc with those birds that 



