334 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



floated on artificial sea-water for thirty days, to my surprise nearly 

 all germinated. 



Living birds can hardly fail to be highly effective agents in 

 the transportation of seeds. I could give many facts showing how 

 frequently birds of many kinds are blown by gales to vast dis- 

 tances across the ocean. We may safely assume that under such 

 circumstances their rate of flight would often be thirty-five miles 

 an hour; and some authors have given a far higher estimate. I 

 have never seen an instance of nutritious seeds passing through the 

 intestines of a bird; but hard seeds of fruit pass uninjured through 

 even the digestive organs of a turkey. In the course of two 

 months, I picked up in my garden twelve kinds of seeds, out of 

 the excrement of small birds, and these seemed perfect, and some 

 of them, which were tried, germinated. But the following fact is 

 more imE>ortant: the crops of birds do not secrete gastric juice, 

 and do not, as I know by trial, injure in the least the germination 

 of seeds; now, after a bird has found and devoured a large supply 

 of food, it is positively asserted that all the grains do not pass 

 into the gizzard for twelve or even eighteen hours. A bird in this 

 interval might easily be blown to the distance of five hundred 

 miles, and hawks are known to look out for tired birds, and the 

 contents of their torn crops might thus readily get scattered. 

 Some hawks and owls bolt their prey whole, and, after an interval 

 of from twelve to twenty hours, disgorge pellets, which, as I know 

 from experiment made in the Zoological Gardens, include seeds 

 capable of germination. Some seeds of the oat, wheat; millet, 

 canary, hemp, clover, and beet germinated after having been 

 from twelve to twenty-one hours in the stomachs of different 

 birds of prey; and two seeds of beet grew after having been thus 

 retained for two days and fourteen hours. Fresh-water fish, I find, 

 eat seeds of many land and water plants; fish are frequently de- 

 voured by birds, and thus the seeds might be transported from 

 place to place. I forced many kinds of seeds into the stomachs of 

 dead fish, and then gave their bodies to fishing-eagles, storks and 

 pelicans; these birds, after an interval of many hours, either re- 

 jected the seeds in pellets or passed them in their excrement; and 

 several of these seeds retained the power of germination. Certain 

 seeds, however, were always killed by this process. 



Locusts are sometimes blown to great distances from the land. 

 I myself caught one 370 miles from the coast of Africa, and have 

 heard of others caught at greater distances. The Rev. R. T. Lowe 

 informed Sir C. Lyell that in November, 1844, swarms of locusts 

 visited the island of Madeira. They were in countless numbers. 



