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that in the case of hybrids intended for exhibition, 

 and therefore fed upon colour feed, the great difficulty 

 is to get tliem through the first moult. Now in my 

 case and in that of others who do not exhibit and who 

 consequently do not colour feed, there is nothing like 

 this difficulty. Not that I am sa3ang that none at all 

 ever die; a certain percentage of birds must die under 

 any circumstances, wherever they are kept and what- 

 ever they are fed on. But so few die that one cannot 

 but be struck by the difference in this respect between 

 these birds and the colour fed ones. 



These gentlemen tell me moreover that the life of 

 a show hybrid when it does survive its first moult 

 is not a very long one, and that it averages only three 

 or four years. Now if we ask the first hundred 

 fanciers we meet what is the reason of this it is all 

 Lombard Street to a China orange that half of them 

 will say that it is the knocking about the country that 

 kills the birds, and that the other half will be equally 

 sure that it is the colour feed that is at fault. It is 

 quite possible that the travelling, involving as it does 

 a certain amount of nervous shock, want of sleep, and 

 rapid transitions of temperature (though, as will be 

 elsewhere seen, this latter is the least harmful of the 

 three) may be responsible for some of the mischief; 

 but since I have as yet seen nothing in the course of 

 my post mortem examinations to lead me to think that 

 the colouring agent itself has any deleterious effect, 

 and since the great majority of these hybrids die of 

 the same septic troubles as are so commonly associated 

 with ^%^ feeding, it is only rational to connect the 

 unnatural shortness of life met with in these show 

 birds with the ^'g'g that is used as the excipient of the 

 colouring matter. 



It may be advanced against my argument that the 

 pure bred show Canary, also colour fed, has a some- 

 what longer lease of life than the hybrid, although 



