324 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
February 19. 
appearance of the silver pheasant. I believe your chances 
of success in your experiment to he considerable. A neigh¬ 
bour here, who kept silver pheasants, used occasionally to 
allow them to run about, till one of them broke bounds. [ There 
lies the unconquerable difficulty.] I have seen a silver 
pheasant cock here, who came through a passage into the 
street, and treated the passers-by with the utmost indiffer¬ 
ence, and even showed a disposition to do battle with some 
children, had they ventured to molest him. 
“ My friend is obliged to clean out the cage of his silver 
pheasant cock himself, no one else daring to go in; and I 
have seen the blood drawn from his hand when he has put 
it in to move some of the feeding vessels. During the laying 
| season, the male bird watches the nest very closely, walking 
j backwards and forwards almost like a sentinel. I recommend 
you to accustom your pheasant chicks to the utmost regu¬ 
larity in their feeding times, and to assemble at the sound¬ 
ing of a whistle. If you provide yourself either with a com¬ 
mon dog whistle, or what they call the railway whistle, and 
vary your ordinary mode of calling your poultry with some | 
blasts thereof, you will be surprised to find how quickly they 
will learn the meaning of this method of assembling them. 
My own father always whistled his poultry together, using, 
however, the one with which nature had furnished him.”— 
./. S. IF. 
Another informant more decidedly indicates the weak 
point. “ You will not succeed with the silver pheasants; 
they are so erratic that they will go miles for a freak. A friend 
I met the other day was obliged to give up keeping a cock 
bird in his garden, because he attacked the nurses and 
children so savagely. This, however, is in your favour.”— 
W. 1 ). F . And such was my own opinion ; and being un¬ 
willing to believe so able a scientific naturalist as Temminck 
mistaken in his judgment, I placed some silver pheasants’ 
eggs under a hen, to be the future ornaments of our poultry- 
yard. Meanwhile, an opportunity of visiting Ivnowsley—then 
in the height of its glory—was afforded, and there I learned 
that Temminck’s suggestions had been acted on, and found 
to be based on groundless hopes. The provoking thing is, 
that for the first year, or year-and-a-half, all goes on right; 
an inexperienced amateur would feel sure that he had 
already added a member of a hitherto unsubdued genus to 
the domestic vassals of the human race. The birds are 
already largely sprinkled with their adult black and white 
feathers amidst their juvenile garb of russett. Over-night 
they are obedient to their keeper’s call, and will even feed 
from his hand; next morning, where are they ? Eloped, 
absquatulated— erupit, evasit —over the hills and far away; 
whistle as loud as you please, they ’re gone ’coons ! 
Subsequently, Nov. 3, 1849, a communication, from the 
late Lord Derby himself, confirmed the hopelessness of 
attaching these handsome creatures to civilised society, 
otherwise than by incarcerating them. “ Allow me, by the 
way, to correct an error you seem to have fallen into as to 
golden pheasants. It is not their shyness, alone, that has 
kept them as aviary birds, but their rambling dispositions ; 
so that persons do not like to run the risk of losing them 
altogether by turning them out. I have done this, and have 
the last year or two had several bred wild in these grounds, 
and our sportsmen have often met with them in the shooting 
covers near the house. A similar objection exists as regards 
the silver birds, but in their case it is strengthened by their 
pugnacity, and the consequent fear of their driving away the 
common pheasant, to the destruction of all battues.” 
In confirmation of this, I have been informed of a noble¬ 
man (name not stated), who gave liberty to two hundred 
silver pheasants ; the consequence of which was, that they 
exterminated the common pheasants, but without stocking 
the neighbourhood with their own race, which, on the con¬ 
trary, gradually dwindled away and was lost. 
Now, “both the Daron Cuvier, and more particularly 
his brother, have pointed out the importance of studying 
the intellectual character, or moral instincts, of the species 
(of dogs), as a method too much neglected, and, in this 
instance, of the first importance.”— Col. Hamilton Smith. 
Equal attention ought to be paid to the natural disposi¬ 
tions of birds, before any general conclusions respecting 
them are decided upon. Among the pheasants there are 
striking peculiarities, one of which is an innate aversion to 
true domestication pervading the whole genus. We know 
of no species of pheasant which has been tamed so as to be : 
trusted with liberty, in the certainty of its voluntary return 
home to the protection of man at due periods. If we were 
told of a newly-discovered gallinaceous bird, the fact that it | 
really had proved domesticable, we should surmise before¬ 
hand that it could not be a pheasant; on the other hand, 
the news of a hitherto unknown pheasant being brought 
) from the recesses of central Asia would furnish no reason¬ 
able hope that we had thereby obtained any addition to our 
poultry-yards. Would any one, on receiving a pair of rare 
pheasants, in life, venture to turn them loose, even though 
bred in captivity, in the same way as he would a newly- 
arrived cock and hen sent over from the east ? 
Amongst other genera the capacity for domestication 
seems universal throughout that special genus. The geese, 
and the birds most nearly allied to them, exhibit it in a 
remarkable degree, in contrast to the swans, the largest, 
and the teal, the smallest, of fresh-water birds—being, so 
far, examples of the happy medium. As yet we know little 
of more than one species of turkey, but there is good reason 
to hope that useful poultry stock may be obtained from the 
turkies of central America; the great fear respecting the 
beautiful ocellated species is lest it should prove too tender 
here, a point which has scarcely yet been tested, and which 
can only be guessed at without a fair experiment. The only 
living bird in Europe, a hen, was knocked down at the 
Ivnowsley sale for the trifling sum of X'12. 
We may be considered as assuming too much in resting 
any argument on the innate and unchangeable tempers of 
birds, but a most observant investigator has recorded his 
remarks on the inherent dispositions that are permanently 
hereditary among certain races of men ; and we cannot sup¬ 
pose the inferior creature to be more pliable in its nature 
than the vastly superior one. 
“ The peculiar characteristics of the three great races, 
which have, at different periods, held dominion over the 
East, cannot fail to strike every reflecting traveller. The 
distinctions between them are so marked, and are so fully 
illustrated even to this day, that they appear to be more 
than accidental—to be consequent upon certain laws, and to 
be traceable to certain physical causes.” 
It would be out of place here to quote this remarkable 
passage further, and therefore the reader is simply referred 
to Layard's Nineveh, vol. ii., page 241. D. 
(To be continued.) 
FRACTICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE 
MANAGEMENT OF BEES. 
By Henry Wenman Newman, Esq. 
(Continued from page 287.) 
BEE PASTURAGE. 
Non semper idem floribus est honos vernis. —Hor. 
(The same regard is not indiscriminately due to the spring flowers). 
Much of the success of bees depends on the good or bad 
pasturage of a country. A com country is by far the best, 
as the clover or grasses afford a long and permanent 
blossom for the bees, at the time when the early flowers 
have faded, and in the autumn, where there is no heath, the 
clover in September supplies its place. 
The Trifolium repens, or Dutch Clover, is the best, then 
the Honeysuckle Clover. Yellow Trefoil, or Hop Clover, is 
also an excellent bee-flower, and blossoms in September. 
We must feel how wonderful is this succession of flowers, 
when we consider that scarcely a week passes from the com¬ 
mencement of the earliest bee-flowers, the Heath, the 
Crocus, the Willow tribe, &c., without some new blossom 
starting into life, supplying the bees with their food. The 
great architect of the universe, who givetli fodder to the 
“ cattle, and feedeth the young ravens which call upon him,” 
has not overlooked even the smallest insects; his super¬ 
intending and over-ruling Providence is displayed in beau¬ 
tifully adapting every mouth, and every week, to the supply 
of all their wants ! 
I will now give an account of those flowers which supply 
the bees in my own neighbourhood. The first is the Crocus , 
and next the Erica cornea (Flesh-coloured Heath), and 
about this time there is an exudation from the bark of the 
