110 GEOGRAPHICAL IMPOETAlSrCE OF BIEDS. 



and of very many other wild vegetables is nninjured, perhapff 

 even stimulated to more vigorous growth, by the natural chem- 

 istry of the bird's stomach. The power of flight and the restless 

 habits of the bird enable it to transport heavy seeds to far greater 

 distances than they could be carried by the wind. A swift-winged 

 bird may drop cherry-stones a thousand miles from the tree they 

 grow on ; a hawk, in tearing a pigeon, may scatter from its crop 

 the still fresh rice it had swallowed at a distance of ten degrees of 

 latitude, and thus the occurrence of isolated plants, in situations 

 where their presence can not otherwise be weU explained, is easily 

 accounted for.* There is a large class of seeds apparently spe- 

 cially fitted by nature for dissemination by animals. I refer to 

 those which attach themselves, by means of hooks, or by viscous 

 juices, to the coats of quadrupeds and the feathers of birds, and 

 are thus transported wherever their hving vehicles may chance to 

 wander. Some birds, too, deliberately bury seeds in the earth, or 

 in holes excavated by them in the bark of trees, not indeed with 

 a foresight aiming directly at the propagation of the plant, but 

 from apparently purposeless secretiveness, or as a mode of pre- 

 serving food for future use. 



The tame fowls play a much less conspicuous part in rural life 

 than the quadrupeds, and, in their relations to the economy of 

 nature, they are of very much less moment than four-footed ani- 

 mals, or than the undomesticated birds. The domestic turkey f 

 is probably more numerous in the territory of the United States 

 than the wild bird of the same species ever was, and the grouse 

 can not, at the period of their greatest abundance, have counted as 



* Pigeons were shot near Albany, in New York, a few years ago, with green 

 rice in their crops, which it was thought must have been growing, a very few 

 hours before, at the distance of seven or eight hundred miles. The efforts of 

 the Dutch to confine the cultivation of the nutmeg to the island of Banda are 

 said to have been defeated by the birds, which transported this heavy fruit to 

 other islands. 



f The wild turkey takes readily to the water, and is able to cross rivers of 

 very considerable width by swimming. By way of giving me an idea of the 

 former abundance of this bird, an old and highly respectable gentleman who 

 was among the early white settlers of the West, told me that he once counted, 

 in walking down the northern bank of the Ohio River, within a distance of 

 four miles, eighty-four turkeys as they landed singly, or at most in pairs, after 

 swimming over from the Kentucky side. 



