CARRIER PIGEON. 
persons sending goods were bound by such no- 
tice. And so if they give notice that they will 
not be answerable for the faults of the master 
and mariners, provided the notice is so given as 
to afford ground of presumption of its reaching 
the party for whom the goods are carried, or in 
such way that it shall be his fault if he does not 
receive the notice.—The law relating to the re- 
sponsibility of carriers has been thus more fully 
stated than is usual in this work in regard to 
legal subjects, because it is one of general and 
popular interest. 
CARRIER PIGEON. This bird is a native of 
the East; and the practice of sending letters by 
pigeons belongs principally to Hastern coun- 
tries. The pigeons chosen for this service are 
called, in Arabic, hamahn. They have a ring of 
particoloured feathers round the neck, red feet, 
covered with down, and build their nests in the 
neighbourhood of human habitations. In the 
province of Irak,—that is, Chaldzea, Babylonia, 
and Assyria,—white pigeons are trained with 
the least difficulty. An actual post-system, in 
which pigeons were the messengers, was estab- 
lished by the sultan Noureddin Mahmoud, who 
died in 1174. It was improved and extended by 
the caliph Ahmed Alraser-Lidiv-Allah, of Bag- 
dad, who died in 1225. The price of a well- 
trained pair of such pigeons was, at that time, 
1,000 dinars, that is, Arabic ducats. ‘This flying- 
post lasted till 1258, when Bagdad fell into the 
hands of the Mongols, and was destroyed by them. 
| At present only a few wealthy individuals in the 
| East keep these pigeons. It requires much time 
and patience to train them, As soon as the 
young—a cock and a hen are preferred—are 
fledged, they are made as tame as possible, and 
accustomed to each other’s society. They are 
then sent, in an uncovered cage, to the place 
whither they are usually to carry messages. If 
one of them is carried away, after having been 
well treated for some time, it will certainly re- 
turn to its mate. A small letter is written on 
the finest silk-paper, sometimes on a particular 
kind called d¢rd-paper. This is placed length- 
wise under one wing, and fastened with a pin— 
the point being turned from the body—to a fea- 
ther. It needs not to be mentioned that no part 
of the letter must hang loose, lest the wind should 
be collected in it, the wing become tired, and 
the pigeon be compelled to alight. There were 
similar posts in Egypt in 1450, for which colum- 
baries were prepared in towers, erected at cer- 
tain distances for the public security—This cus- 
tom is, however, not confined to the nations of 
the East. Decius Brutus, according to the elder 
Pliny’s account, sent despatches from Modena by 
pigeons; and in modern times, they were made 
use of, during the Dutch war, by the inhabitants 
of Haerlem, when besieged in 1573, and in Ley- 
den, in 1574. It is also well-known, that some 
merchants in Paris and Amsterdam employ car- 
rier-pigeons, in order that the course of exchange 
CARROT. 
and the prices of stocks in Paris, may be known 
as soon as possible in Amsterdam. 
CARROT,—botanically Daucus. A genus of 
annual and biennial plants, of the umbelliferous 
tribe. Two species grow wild in Britain ; thir- 
teen have been introduced from foreign countries, 
—principally the south of Europe ; and six other 
species are known to botanists. The flowers of 
all the species grow in umbels, and have five ob- 
cordate, unequal petals; and the seeds of all grow 
in pairs, and are unbeaked, and have four rows 
of flat prickles with intermediate ribs. Four of 
the species, the shore, the prickly-seeded, the 
golden-flowered, and the Monte-Videan, are an- 
nual weeds of respectively Greece, Barbary, Spain 
and South America ; and all the other species—’ 
excepting the cultivated varieties of the common 
species—are biennial herbaceous weeds,—one of 
Cornwall, one of Barbary, and the rest of the 
south of Hurope. ‘The prickly-seeded and the 
hispid species have pink flowers; the golden- 
flowered and the small-flowered species have yel- 
low flowers ; and all the other species have white 
flowers. 
The common species, Daucus carota, concen- 
trates in itself all the true interest of the genus. 
Its normal form is a mere weed of Britain ; but 
its varieties comprise all the kinds of cultivated 
carrots of the garden and the field, of Britain and 
the continent. Its root is hard, fusiform, and 
biennial; its stem is rough and furrowed ; its 
leaves are tripinnate, with pinnatifid leaflets, and 
acute, lanceolate segment-lines; its flowers are 
white, but comprise one red or purplish barren 
flower, in the centre of each umbel; the umbel, 
when the seeds ripen, assumes a contracted and 
concave shape, somewhat similar to that of a 
bird’s nest ; and the seeds are provided with 
slender bristles, which render them easily buoy- 
ant in the breeze. The wild plant abounds in 
gravelly soil, by the sides of fields, at the base of 
hedges, and athwart the face of pasture grounds, 
in many parts of Britain. It is popularly called 
the bird’s nest, in allusion to the form of its um- 
bels at the ripening of its seeds; and it differs | 
little in the appearance of its stems, leaves, and 
flowers, from the cultivated varieties. Its root, 
however, as compared to that of any of the culti- 
vated varieties, is small, forked, tough, sticky, 
stringy, hard, woody, disagreeable, and possessed 
of powerful and almost poisonous properties ; and 
its seeds are used in medicine, and esteemed a 
good diuretic. Yet though this wild plant is 
regarded by almost all botanists and cultivators 
709 
| 
as the origin of the cultivated varieties, other || 
persons than mere novices have great difficulty 
in not pronouncing it a totally and even widely 
different species. “The plants of this sort,” re- 
marks Miller, “do not differ greatly in appear- 
ance from the garden carrot, which has led some 
persons into an opinion of their being the same ; 
but those who have attempted to cultivate the 
wild sort for many years, are fully convinced of 
| 
