148 NATURAL STATE NATIONAL PROFIT. 



art of man. From their peculiar beauty and inno- 

 cence, they have always ranked among the chief 

 feathered favourites of mankind ; and in the eastern 

 countries, the original sources of religious superstition, 

 the dove has ever been a great object of veneration, as 

 an emblem of something divine. 



But to proceed to a far more material point 

 the NATIONAL PROFIT of encouraging the breed of 

 pigeons to any great extent, has long been the sub- 

 ject of much dispute. M. Duhamel, the apologist of 

 these beautiful favourites, I apprehend, has not been 

 a successful advocate. He avers, that pigeons do not 

 feed upon green corn that their bills have not suffi- 

 cient power to dig for seeds in the earth, and that they 

 only pick up scattered grain which would else be 

 wasted, or become the prey of other birds. From the 

 season of the corn appearing, he says, pigeons subsist 

 upon the seeds of weeds, the multiplication of which 

 they must, in consequence, greatly prevent. 



Another writer has of late introduced a story of 

 the farmers of a certain district in England, who, 

 finding their corn and pulse crops greatly reduced, 

 attributed it to the vast quantity of pigeons kept 

 among them, which, on such account, by a general 

 resolution they agreed to destroy. A few seasons 

 afterwards, it seems they found their land so ex- 

 hausted, and their crops so eaten up with weeds, that 

 they came to a general wish for their pigeons back 

 again. Now this is either a lame story, or the farm- 

 ers implicated were very lame farmers, as being 

 ignorant how to weed their land, without the assist- 

 ance of instruments, the use of which must cost them 



