128 THE WOr.LD OF LIFE 



Wilson then gives a rongli calciilation of the probahle num- 

 bers of this great flight of pigeons, and comes to the conclusion 

 that its whole length was 240 miles, and that the number of 

 birds must have been considerably more than 2000 millions. 

 If each pigeon consumed only half a pint of food daily, the 

 quantity would amount to over IT millions of bushels daily. 

 Audubon, who went throu2;h the same country about twentv 



7 ~ 1-1/ 



years later, confirms Wilson's account in every essential part ; 

 and the language of the former is so simple and restrained, 

 that there is evidently no attempt to exaggerate what he wit- 

 nessed and was informed of by many independent observers. 

 Waterton, with his usual scepticism as to the observations of 

 other naturalists, treats the whole narrative as gross exaggera- 

 tion or fabrication ; on which the late Professor Alfred Xewton 

 remarks, that the critic would probably have been less severe 

 had he known that, 150 years earlier, these pigeons so swarmed 

 and ravaged the colonists' crops near Montreal, that a bishop 

 of his own Church was constrained to exorcise them with holy 

 water as if they had been demons. Professor Xewton adds 

 that the rapid and sustained flight of these pigeons is as well 

 established as their former overwhelming abundance, birds hav- 

 ing been killed in the State of Xew York whose crops contained 

 undigested grains of rice that must have been not long before 

 plucked and swallowed in South Carolina or Georgia. The 

 passenger pigeon has several times been shot in Great Britain, 

 and Professor Xewton believes that some of these crossed the 

 Atlantic unassisted by man. 



Considering the vast multitudes of these birds in a state of 

 nature, notwithstanding the variety of birds of prey in Xorth 

 America, together with its unequalled powers of flight, it must 

 be classed as one of the finest examples of what DarAvin termed 

 " dominant species," and may also be considered as the highest 

 development of the special type of bird-life manifested in the 

 order Columbse or Pigeons ; and it will doubtless, by future 

 generations of bird-lovers, be counted as a blot upon the boasted 

 civilisation of the nineteenth century that, in its mad greed 



