Tile Carrier fully Developed. 
75 
approaching perfection. There is, therefore, an ample field for any patient and persevering fancier 
to produce as many as he can of this fascinating pigeon ; and if breeders would only abandon this 
wretched “ breeding to sell ” system, and breed from fezuer birds of their best quality, we should 
soon witness such collections as have never yet been seen. There has already been great improve- 
ment, as we remarked some pages back ; and what a few have already done by adopting this 
system, and by carefully matching their birds, is proof of what can be accomplished. It is to 
promote this state of things that we go so much into detail ; and though what we here lay down 
may be needless to some, who already know all that we could tell them, and there is ample room 
for difference of opinion on many points, so that we cannot pretend that even what we do give as 
general rules arc perfectly correct in every ease or in every point, still we do hope to teach many 
what it might otherwise take them years of very unsatisfactory experience to acquire. 
We will next follow the same pair of heads to full maturity, and refer to Figs. 34 and 35 as 
Fig- 34 - 
representing the same birds at their best development. Fig. 34, then, represents the young cock, 
D, at the age of three years, when the beak-wattle is fully developed. The first thing to be said 
is, that if the beak-wattle be of the desired shape at eighteen months, as in D, there is no fear 
of its becoming unshapely afterwards. Few have been seen so well formed as this without being a 
little trimmed off or altered ; still, we have seen a few quite as good in shape, and even mefre in 
diameter, which had never been trimmed at all, and the figure is, therefore, no exaggeration in that 
point. We cannot, however, assert that we ever yet saw such a wattle as represented here, with a 
beak so good as here shown, since, at the age of three years, when matured, however good the beak 
may have been, it will have shrunk and curled a little as age comes on, so as to show more or less 
space between the mandibles, and so lose the solid, close-fitting appearance. This, we say, is the 
present experience ; but we do not believe even this point to be at all an impossibility, and as we 
have already stated that in our judgment great progress has very lately been made in the improve- 
ment of the Carrier, we do expect yet to see better-formed beaks in old birds than any yet shown. 
Still, we must see them first before we can represent them as positively attained, but in the hope 
of what may be done we confessedly show an ideal beak, that it may be seen what the standard 
of perfection is. In judging between two birds in this point, we need hardly say — as it necessarily 
follows from what has been said already — that should an old bird show a beak even a little better, 
