RING DOVE. 289 



Mr. Booth, in his Analytical Dictionary, says, " Pigeons 

 of all kinds are understood to be particularly faithful in 

 their loves. In courtship they salute with their bills, and 

 murmur, or coo, their notes of pleasure. The male and 

 female sit by turns while hatching, and alternately feed 

 their young. They are not the birds of a busy and tur- 

 bulent world, they have no gall-bladder, and, therefore, 

 the secretions of the liver are, it is supposed, never con- 

 verted into black bile : a fluid which has, in all ages, been 

 associated with the irritable passions of mankind. Doves 

 were sacred among the priests of antiquity. They drew 

 the car of the celestial Venus, and were the messengers of 

 the will of the gods. It was a Dove (ever since sacred to 

 peace) that brought the olive branch to the ark of Noah, 

 for which she has her place among the constellations ; and 

 the Christian world still personate the Holy Spirit under 

 the mystic emblem of a Dove." 



The feeling in favour of Doves and Pigeons in general, 

 receives further confirmation from the habits of the natives 

 of other countries. A writer in the fourth volume of the 

 Naturalist says, " The Common Pigeon swarms in the city 

 of Petersburg and the country ; it is esteemed sacred, and 

 called God's Bird by the Russians, from the circumstance 

 of the Holy Spirit assuming that form when it descended 

 upon our Saviour. To kill and eat it is considered an 

 act of profanation. I had one day an opportunity of ob- 

 serving, myself, how the respect for the Pigeon prevails 

 amongst the lower orders. I shot six, away from a village, 

 at one shot, and brought them home, with the intention 

 of obtaining that master-achievement of modern cookery, 

 a pigeon-pie ; when I threw them on the table, a Russian 

 servant who was near, after several ejaculations against my 

 impiety and cruelty, snatched up one of the dead birds, and, 

 bursting into tears, commenced kissing and fondling it." 



VOL. II. IT 



