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CHAPTER XVI. 



THE CINNAMON CANARY. 



Our language is not very fruitful in words having their meaning stamped on the surface, thanks 

 to the ups and downs of its early history and the quantity of foreign material imported, to the 

 intense gratification of philologists and the unmeasured disgust of school-boys, whose introduction 

 to roots and crude forms is not always connected with associations of the most pleasant character. 

 But the name of the Canary at the head of this chapter surely tells its own story. It is the colour 

 of, and takes its name from, the ordinary cinnamon of commerce. This name, however, is of 

 comparatively recent date, though now generally accepted and firmly established. The original 

 Cinnamon bird was a sober, quiet, unpretentious-looking Canary, and in the olden time was more 

 generally known as the Dun ; and as the meaning of the word "dun " in our "Walker" is " of a dun 

 colour," we must leave it there as expressing in very intelligible terms a correct idea of what the 

 colour really is. Many of the old school still call the bird by this name, and in some few schedules 

 the nomenclature Cinnamon Dun is adopted, though we do not consider the name a happy one. 

 The old name was certainly more appropriate as regards the old style of bird than the modern 

 one, and it may be that with an improvement and alteration in the colour the name has gradually 

 altered, and as the quiet dun has given place to the richer and warmer cinnamon, so has the one 

 name displaced the other. The Yellow Cinnamon of old times (remember that the technical terms 

 Yellow and Buff run through the whole Canary family) was a bird in which the prevailing pale 

 brown, such as it was, was tinged with a greenish-yellow — or perhaps yellowish-green would convey 

 a better idea — and the more general or " level" this pale dun tone, and the more evenly distributed, 

 the better the bird. In Buffs, the dun was more decided, more true to name and character, 

 singularly soft and mellow in tone and covered with a delicious bloom ; in fact, the whole bird had 

 more of the dove-colour about it than anything we can compare it with, and we are not surprised 

 at the name Dun being given at a period of its history when possibly it more correctly indicated 

 its colour than the modern title. 



We have heard it said that by breeding from Greens, selecting those with the brownest tinge 

 and following up the work closely, the result will be Cinnamons, and have also read some account 

 of work carried out in this way, the end of which was alleged to have been the advent of 

 Cinnamons ; but we entirely discard all such theories : no combination will produce them. Forty 

 years ago we, in the exercise of a very simple faith, planted some field daisies and primroses 

 with the roots uppermost in the confident anticipation of their growing into double daisies and 

 polyanthuses. The one result is as possible as the other. We should be sorry to dispute the fact 

 of Cinnamons having been born from a pair of Greens, but there was gold in the crucible to begin 

 with : Cinnamon blood lurked in the veins of the Green to a certainty. 



What may have been the origin of this Canary, as a variety, we can only surmise ; but that it 

 is a distinct variety, its peculiar characteristics not common to other Canaries, and certain native 

 properties not elsewhere discoverable and which seem to cling to it in spite of the endless crosses 

 to which it has been subjected, abundantly testify. Most prominent among these is the pink eye, 



