IVILD ANIMALS IN CAPTIVITY 



animals, abounding with the most interesting facts bearing 

 upon this subject, from which we beg to make the following 

 quotation. At p. 357 we read : — 



" In very severe winters great numbers of the black bears of America migrate 

 from Canada into the United States, but in milder seasons, when they have 

 been well fed, they remain and hibernate in the North." 



And at p. 363 it is stated : — ' 



" The late Admiral W. H. Smyth informed me that, when cruising in the 

 Cornwallis amidst the Philippine Islands, he saw more than once, after those 

 dreadful hurricanes called typhoons, floating masses of wood, with trees 

 growing upon them. The ships have sometimes been in imminent peril, as 

 these islands were often mistaken for terra Jirma, when, in faet, they were in 

 rapid motion. 



" It is highly interesting to trace, in imagination, the effects of the passage 

 of these rafts from the mouth of a large river to some archipelago, raised 

 from the deep by the operations of the volcano and the earthquake. If a 

 storm arise, and the first vessel be wrecked, still many a bird and insect may 

 succeed in gaining by flight some island of the newly-formed group, while 

 the seeds and berries of herbs and shrubs which fall into the waves may be 

 thrown upon the strand. But if the surface of the deep be calm, and the 

 rafts are carried along by a current, or wafted by some slight breath of air 

 fanning the foliage of the green trees, it may arrive, after a passage of several 

 weeks, at the bay of an island, into which its plants and animals may be 

 poured out as from an ark, and thus a colony of several hundred new species 

 may at once be naturalized. 



" Although the transportation of such rafts may be of extremely rare and 

 accidental occurrence, and may happen only once in thousands or tens of 

 thousands of years, they may yet account in tropical countries for the exten- 

 sion of some species of mammalia, birds, insects, landshells, and plants to 

 lands which without such aid they could never have reached. 



"Some birds in the Order Passeres devour the seeds of plants in great 

 quantities, which they eject again in very distant places, without destroying 

 its faculty of vegetation : thus a flight of larks will fill the cleanest field with 

 a great quantity of various kinds of plants, as the Melilot trefoil (Medicago 

 lupulina), and others whose seeds are so heavy that the wind is not able to 

 scatter them to any distance. In like manner, the blackbird and missel- 

 thrush, when they devour berries in too great quantities, are known to consign 

 them to the earth undigested in their excrement. 



" The sudden death to which great numbers of frugivorous birds are annually 

 exposed must not be omitted as auxiliary to the transportation of seed to 

 new habitations. When the sea retires from the shore, and leaves fruit and 

 seeds on the beach or in the mud of estuaries, it might by the returning tide 

 wash them away again or destroy them by long immersion ; but when they 

 are gathered by land birds which frequent the sea-side, or by waders and 



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