1HE PASSENGER PIGEON. 355 



feathers of this pigeon " fall off at the least touch." From this we 

 may infer, to a certainty, that every pigeon which was unlucky enough 

 to be undermost in the solid masses would lose every feather from 

 its uppermost parts, through the pressure of the feet of those above 

 it. Now, I would fain believe that instinct taught these pigeons to 

 resort to a certain part of the forest solely for the purpose of repose, 

 and not to undergo a process of inevitable suffocation, and, at the 

 same time, to have their backs deprived of every feather, while they 

 were voluntarily submitting to this self-inflicting method of ending 

 their days. 



" Many trees," says Mr Audubon, " two feet in diameter, I ob- 

 served, were broken off at no great distance from the ground ; and 

 the branches of many of the largest and tallest had given way, as if 

 the forest had been swept by a tornado. Everything proved to me 

 that the number of birds resorting to this part of the forest must be 

 immense beyond conception." I know that the force of a tornado 

 will break the trunk of a tree two feet in diameter, because its force 

 acts horizontally against the upright stem ; but how is it possible 

 that a multitude of pigeons, alighting upon a tree, could cause its 

 upright bole, two feet in diameter, to break off at no great distance 

 from the ground ? The branches of the tree, which took their lead 

 diagonally from the bole, might possibly have given way under a 

 heavy pressure, because they were inclined more or less from their 

 perpendicular; but the upright bole itself would stand uninjured, 

 and defy for ever any weight that could be brought to bear upon it 

 from above. 



I now leave the assemblage of wild beasts, the solid masses of 

 pigeons as large as hogsheads, and the broken trunk of the tree two 

 feet in diameter, to the consideration of those British naturalists who 

 have volunteered to support a foreigner in his exertions to teach Mr 

 Bull ornithology in the nineteenth century. 



The passages upon which I have just commented form part of 

 "the facts" on which R. B., in the Magazine of Natural History 

 (vol. vi., p. 273), tells us that the value of Mr Audubon's Biography 

 of Birds solely rests. No wonder that, ruit alto a culmine. By the 

 way, I observe at the end of that Biography a most laudatory notice 

 by Mr Swainson. He tells us that Audubon contemplated Nature 



