WILD 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 
Cormcallis 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 firma, when, in fact, 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 weaves 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 {3Iedicago 
lupidina), 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 
ai'e gathered by land birds which frequent the sea-side, or by waders and 
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