April 21. THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 47 
health of the birds than on purity of breed. You further 
object to plumage occupying the post of honour. How you 
would determine the purity of the breed except by the 
plumage, I am at a loss to conceive. And again, you say that 
a fourth test will be insisted on, and that is in an economical 
point of view. I confess, that after so many sensible (if 
you will allow me to say so) observations from the Editor, 
I hardly expected that he would have raised a question as 
to whether, in the same breed, nay, even in the same brood, 
a spangled or laced, a bearded or non-bearded bird, was the 
more economical ; had it been a question between Spanish 
and Polands, I would have admitted the pertinency of the 
remark. As to the merits of the bearded or non-bearded, I 
must surely be admitted impartial, as I do not possess a 
single specimen of either variety. I am perfectly aware that 
gentlemen of the Vivian school uphold the beards ; but can 
this be wondered at ? and “ I’ll be sworn” that your corres¬ 
pondent, (whose letter you say is before you,) belongs to 
this class, as it is, in my experience, an impossibility to find 
a bearded advocate among the real judges who are dis¬ 
interested. I have never seen any attempt at a defence, 
unless that by Dr. Horner, in Volume viii., may be so 
considered ; but I think you will be candid enough to confess 
that he leaves the subject where he found it, for sound 
argument there is none ; and, moreover, looking to the 
prize lists, he is certainly not an impartial judge, if, as I 
presume, Master Horner is his son. 
By-the-by, I certainly misunderstood your meaning when 
you spoke of the Spangled Polands being a recognised 
variety, but I did so from the universal custom in speaking 
of the animal kingdom of calling a distinct breed by that 
name.— Scrutator. 
[While we have grave doubts as to the imputed parentage 
of very many of the “ wood-side hybrids” between the com¬ 
mon fowl and the pheasant, there is no question that such 
birds have been produced on several occasions, though as 
to their breeding inter se we have no proof. Stranger 
crosses than you mention have, however, occurred—one 
between the pheasant and pintado, for instance; and a stuffed 
specimen of the pheasant and red grouse is in the posses¬ 
sion of a friend. 
The question of the fertility, inter se, of hybrids between 
the pheasant and common fowl is not settled by the well- 
known instance of Lord Derby’s Versicolor pheasant, the 
union of which with Pliasianus Colchicus, a closely allied 
species, was a very different thing from that of birds so 
much more remote as those we are now speaking of. Again, 
we cannot consider that “ carriage,” as a characteristic of 
any family of fowls, and such it certainly is, can be regarded 
as merely dependent on health; plumage, also, was to be 
taken in conjunction with other points there referred to. 
But these remarks of ours, with the mention of the fourth 
test, of economical excellence, were made in reference to the 
principles on which poultry at large were to be judged, and 
were not limited to any particular breed. 
“ Beards or no beards” is still a matter of opinion; and 
I we certainly cannot admit the charge of partiality, which you 
imply, by our leaving it an open question for future decision, 
i since with us the beardless, we confess, would have the 
j preference ; but knowing, at the same time, how strongly 
some good judges differ from us, our own opinion was thus 
cautiously expressed. 
We think the different races of our domestic poultry 
might properly be spoken of as n<6-species ; certainly this 
would be permissable, until stronger evidence is forthcoming 
than is now before us, of the necessity of assigning them all 
to one original parent, a conclusion which can hardly be 
drawn from the premises we now possess. But we own, 
that there can be, in our opinion, little question as to the 
propriety of calling the Spangled Bolands “ a recognised 
variety;” had they not been so, they would not have re- 
■ ceived the position assigned them at our Exhibitions. 
We have to thank you for your communications ; and if, 
unfortunately, our opinions should not exactly accord on 
some of the many questions that have lately disturbed the 
I realms of poultrydorn, our object is still the same; and a 
better acquaintance with the various domesticated members 
of the gallinaceous tribes is with both the point to be 
attained, though possibly by different paths.—W.] 
SOMETHING ABOUT BEES. 
“ Yea, I will sing how the celestial boon, 
Money, by some sweet mystery of the dew, 
Is born of air in bosoms of the Flowers, 
Liquid, serene ; and how the diligent bees 
Collect it, working further with such art, 
That odorous tapers thence deck holy shrines. 
O sights, and O effects, lovely and strange ! 
Full of the marvellous and the beautiful! ” 
So Leigh Hunt, in his “Jar of Honey from Mount 
Hybla,” translates a passage from “ the Bees ” of Bueollai: 
those who have read the “Jar” need not be told that,notwith¬ 
standing its name, a very small portion only (about ten) 
of its pages is devoted to bees—a fact that we do not at all 
regret, seeing that in this small portion he makes two 
blunders; one, in the assertion that bees will not thrive 
amongst echoes; the other, that the drones are stung to 
death in the autumn by the working bees. 
We thank him, however, for the graceful collection of 
historical, poetical, and legendary lore that lie has laid 
before us, but, in thanking him, must not forget the share 
that our old friends, the bees,—the “ sweet little angels of 
the ilowery herbs,” the “ little virgins chaste,” as he calls 
them—have had in the composition of it; as has been the 
case in hundreds of other instances, they are its ostensible 
godfathers; and it would indeed seem, that whenever an 
author wants a sunny subject, he fixes upon our favourites, 
and hangs the cobwebs of his fancy on the gossamer of | 
their wings. 
In spite of the reams of good paper that have been spoilt 
in treating upon bees, there are many, very many, points 
relating to their natural history and internal economy, that 
bailie the most skilful and patient investigation : the learned 
and entertaining author of the article from “The Quar¬ 
terly,” lately re-published in Murray’s “Heading for the 
Bail,” mentions that De Montford, who wrote on the subject 
of Bees in 1010, enumerates between five and six hundred 
authors who had then written on the subject; it would, 
perhaps, be difficult to reckon up how many have written 
since that time. Many, however, of those who have, dis¬ 
carding the fables of earlier writers, have cheerfully amused j 
themselves by pulling down the gods of others and setting¬ 
up their own, either in the shape of new classifications, or 
new theories of internal economy, or new modes of manage¬ 
ment, or new “inventions” of some land or other. And 
here we would remark on the manner in which this word 
“invention” has been prostituted of late. A man makes 
his boxes of II-inch stuff instead of inch, or takes an 
inch off their height and adds it to their width, or con¬ 
tracts them towards the base, or what not, and dignifies 
each alteration by the term “ invention.” 
These ideas, started by Leigh Hunt, bring us to The 
Cottage Gardener, and the consideration of what it has 
done for the advancement of bee-science. Me have been 
lately going through the papers and notes on Bee-keeping 
that have appeared in it since its commencement, and we 
have certainly been somewhat amused at the very mild 
advice given to those seeking information in the earlier 
volumes : it was not long, however, before signs of increas¬ 
ing intelligence appealed, and the light which began to 
dawn about the latter end of the first, has become stronger 
and stronger in each succeeding volume, until the sound 
sense of Mr. Bayne; the interesting, but somewhat spe¬ 
culative suggestions of “ The Country Curate and the 
suggestions, practical and otherwise, of the myriads of slur- j 
mishers that have hovered between the two, ever ready to 
dare for the advance of their favourite science, and never | 
ashamed to confess the ill-success of their experiments when 
unsuccessful, have made our pastime something more than 
a dull routine. i 
Yet, we who have gone quietly with the stream scarcely 
perceive how swiftly it now runs—in what a blaze of light 
we carry on our experiments: certainly, as already hinted 
at, our “ vaulting ambition ” has sometimes “ o’er leaped 
itself;” still, though we may have “fallen on the other side,” 
we have mostly come down upon our feet little the worse 
for our tumble : progress has been the upshot of our endea¬ 
vours, and though the progress has been so gradual that we 
scarcely perceive, yet, if we adopt the same rule in the 
present case that we adopt in estimating the progress of 
mankind in everything that civilizes and exalts, and make 
