134 QUANTITIES DEVOURED CALCULATED. 



be consulted on this head, but a sufficient proof of 

 the fact is the reduction of dove-cots throughout all 

 countries where agriculture is best known, valued, 

 and practised. Indeed, the feudal laws in favour of 

 these birds were a most cruel and fertile source of 

 oppression. Every one will judge for himself of the 

 degree of credit to be given to the following state- 

 ment, extracted from Mr. Vancouver's valuable sur- 

 vey of the county of Devon. 



Pigeons often fly to a great distance for their 

 food, and when they can find corn to eat seldom 

 prey upon any thing else. They begin to eat corn 

 about the middle of July, and rarely want the same 

 food at the stacks in the straw-yards, or in the fields, 

 until the end of barley sowing, which is about old 

 May-day, and which includes a period of two hun- 

 dred and eighty days, or better than three quarters 

 of the year; the rest of the time they live upon the 

 seeds of the weeds and bentings. It is somewhere 

 stated that in England and in Wales, there are 

 twenty thousand DOVE-HOUSES, averaging each at 

 about one hundred pair of old pigeons. We will 

 take this estimation at three-fourths, which will equal 

 one million, one hundred and twenty-five thousand 

 pair of dove-house pigeons in Eugland and Wales. 

 These, to speak moderately, will consume, with what 

 they carry home to their young, one pint of corn 

 per pair daily, and which, for one hundred and forty 

 days, being half the period they are supposed to 

 subsist upon corn, amounts to one hundred and fifty- 

 seven millions, five hundred thousand pints of corn 

 consumed annually, throughout England and Wales, 



