HARDY- — ON PROVINCIAL ACCLIMATIZATION. 27 



•dant in our woods, and of almost identical species. A successfal 

 introduction of this bold, handsome grouse, would add great 

 interest to the wild sports on the open barrens. The hazel hen of 

 northern Europe, (T. honasia), reported to be the best fleshed bird 

 of the grouse tribe, is another association of a country in which 

 spruce woods abound. It is exceedingly like our birch partridge 

 in appearance — a little smaller and wanting the ruff; hke the latter, 

 also, its flesh is white. There are many other northern grouse in 

 both the old and new worlds, but none that I should import as so 

 likely to succeed, and as such valuable acquisitions, as the caper- 

 caillie and the black cock. 



With the fact of the introduction and breeding of the English 

 and gold and silver pheasants at Mr. Downs' establishment we are 

 all acquainted; and the most interesting fact is the well-ascertained 

 capability of the English pheasant to live and find its own subsist- 

 ence in our woods through a rigorous "v^anter. Why should not this 

 experiment be continued? 



It is to be feared that those troops of little songsters with which 

 the fields of England abound, and M^hich have been carefully 

 acclimatized in Australia for old association sake, would die on 

 the first near approach of the mercury to zero. Those that are 

 imported are closely kept within doors. Mr. Downs has two 

 pairs of the European jackdaw, which he hopes will increase in his 

 neighbourhood. These interesting and garrulous little members of 

 the family Corvidce, whose young every English boy covets to 

 obtain and educate to the acquisition of rudimentary speech, would 

 find but few ivy-mantled towers or venerable steeples in which to 

 build their nests ; but when Gilbert White informs that for want of 

 church steeples they will build under ground in rabbit burrows, the 

 new-comers would not be long in devising a remedy for the defect. 



As a second consideration in connection with this wide subject, 

 let us enquire whether any good purpose could be answered by an 

 attempt at domestication or semi-domestication of our indigenous 

 ruminants, the moose and the carriboo. When we consider that 

 these two species are found throughout the old world, under the 

 same conditions of climate and vegetation which attend them in the 

 new, it appears unaccountable that we have no historic records of 

 the subjugation of the carriboo for domestic purposes by the prim- 



