440 THE WHITE CHINA GOOSE. 



Ganders unprovided with female companions ; but the couples 

 which had paired kept constantly together, and the three sin- 

 gle Ganders did not, during temporary separations of the males 

 and females, offer to approach the latter." 



Acting on this advice, I permitted pairs of four different 

 species of Geese to associate together during the season of 

 1846. Three Ganders of the four appeared to think that each 

 Goose, except his own, was at liberty to be unfaithful; and 

 that every Gander, except himself, was wrong in committing 

 an infidelity. What with their jealousies before laying-time, 

 and their quarrels after it, with plenty of Eggs, we did not 

 get a single Gosling of any sort throughout the whole summer. 



THE WHITE CHINA GOOSE. 



Or this variety, Mr. Dixon says : " Every like is not the 

 same," is a principle that is beginning more and more to in- 

 fluence the reasonings of zoologists, and to affect their conclu- 

 sions with respect to Wild Animals. The important deductions 

 derived from minute differences, in creatures that are almost 

 in juxtaposition together, both systematically and locally, may 

 be seen in the late " Voyage of the Beagle round the World," 

 and in the lt Quarterly Review," on "Broderip's Zoological 

 Recreations" (March, 1848). But with Domesticated Ani- 

 mals, a diametrically opposite axiom would seem to hold; they 

 are described and catalogued apparently on the rule that 

 "things maybe unlike, and yet the same." The many dif- 

 ferent kinds of Fowl are supposed to be varieties by which, I 

 presume, is meant transmutable, or at least transmuted forms- 

 of one, or at most, two or three wild originals; and the history 

 of the Domestic Goose is quietly settled, by considering it as 

 the result of a fusion of three or four different species melted 



