NOTE -BOOK OF A NATURALIST. 403 



lord to lord, for to aske sokour, thei maken here letters and 

 bynden them to the nekke of a colver, and letten the colver flee : 

 and the colvern been so taughte, that they flee with the letters to the 

 very place that men wolde sende them to. For the colveres been 

 noryscht in tho places where thei ben sent to : and thei senden 

 hem thus far to beren here letters. And the coheres retoumen 

 azen where as thei ben norisscht, and so they don commounly.' 



During the crusade of St. Louis* they were so era- 

 ployed ; Tasso pressed them into the service in the siege 

 of Jerusalem ; f and Ariosto makes a dove the messenger 

 that spread the news of Orrilo's death through Egypt.J 



The rapidity and power of flight of some of the species 

 is almost incredible. The passenger-pigeon § has been 

 killed in the neighbourhood of New York with its crop 

 full of rice, which the bird could not have procured 

 nearer than the fields of Georgia and Carolina. Audu- 

 bon, who relates this startling, but, I believe, true fact, 

 observes that, as their power of digestion is so great that 

 they will decompose food entirely in twelve hours, the 

 birds which were taken in the neighbourhood of New 

 York must have travelled between three and four hun- 

 dred miles in six hours, an average of speed that reminds 

 one of the famous horse Childers. He, however, could 

 not have sustained his ' flying ' pace of a mile a minute 

 for more than a very short period, whereas the bird is 

 capable of keeping up its wonderful rate of progression 

 during many successive hours. The passenger-pigeon 

 would thus, as Audubon observes, be enabled, were it so 

 inclined, to visit Europe in less than three days. In- 

 stances are not wanting of its presence here ; but the 

 American naturalist who presented a number of these 

 birds to the Earl of Derby, in 1830, with whom they 

 bred, seems to think that those which have been seen at 

 liberty in this country had escaped from some aviary. 



* Joinville. f Book xriii. 



Canto XV. § Ectopistes migratoria. Swainson. 



