From All Soii/'cfs. 
The importer is certainly to be congratulated on a great 
achievement, and we hope that the birds may enjoy a long, 
and happy life in their French aviary. 
From All Sources. 
THE ORIGIN OF NEW BREEDS. 
" Thi!re has been a remarkable crop of striking colour varieties 
among fancy animals of late years. We have had the White Canary 
and the Blue Budgerigar, or Australian Lovebird, appearing at our bird 
shows, and yellow rats, long a desideratum among the admirers of this 
usually unpopular rodent, are now being fixed as a breed." 
" In the case of the two cage-birds above mentioned, the var- 
ieties arr not in themselves new appearances. White Canaries have 
been reported before the strain we now hear most of was obtained and 
fixed on purely Mendellian lines by a lady aviculturist in New Zealand, 
who found the white form was a typical 'recessive.' Blue Budgerigars, 
which, repeating in blue and white the pattern of green and yellow so 
familiar in the ' fortune -telling bird,' have attracted great attention by 
their extreme beauty, were in existence nearly a generation ago, and seem 
to have arisen nearly as early as the now well-known and freely brsd 
yellow form of this popular foreign bird." 
" Possibly, however, this variation has also appeared more than 
once, anf' in ciu- •. tlu fac'r remains that, in spite of the high prices 
obtainable for Blue Budgerigars, the breed of this colour has not been 
multiplied greatly, and the specimens that turn up are generally very 
weakly-looking. This is curious, as they seem nearer the typical bird 
than the yellow breed, having the same black pencilling; but one diffi- 
culty in breeding them appears to be that females among blues are 
produced far more freely than males, so that it is difficult to get the 
latter mates of their own colour, and much in -breeding has probably been 
practised, a proceeding particularly deleterious to these little Parrakeets, 
hardy as their constitution is." 
"One very great point of interest about those new, or compara- 
tively new, colour-forms, is the evidence they afford against the idea, 
combated by Darwin, but now inclined to crop up again among students 
of animal variation in domestication, of the multiple origin of our do- 
mestic animals. We know definitely that these new variations in rats 
and birds were not produced by crossing with alien, but allied, species. 
The rats were bred from yellow varieties of common rats caught in the 
wild state — spontaneous variations with the production of which man had 
nothing to do. The Budgerigar stands very much alone among the 
parrot family ; there is no species near enough to it to be crossed with 
it with any hope of fertile hybrid resulting, and, as a matter of fact, 
hardly any small Parrots have blue as the prevailing colour, though there 
are Blue Macaws." 
