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C.
of Strickland,
→having this part bluish; the
tail has a terminal dark bar, with the
→OMIT
outer feathers externally edged
→at the base with white; the
wings have two black
semi-domestic
and some
truly wild
have, besides the two black bars, the wings chequered with black. These several marks do not occur together in any other species of the whole family. Now, in every one of the domestic breeds, taking thoroughly well-bred birds, all the above marks, even to the white edging of the outer tail-feathers, sometimes concur perfectly developed. Moreover, when
birds belonging to two
→or more distinct
breeds are crossed,
of which
blue or
any of the above-specified marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt suddenly to acquire these
→To give one instance out of several which I have observed: —
I crossed
↑
fantails, which breed very true, with some black barbs — and it so happens that blue varieties of barbs are so rare that I never heard of an instance in England; and the mongrels were black, brown, and mottled. I also crossed a barb with a spot, which is a white bird with a red tail and red spot on the forehead, and which notoriously breeds very true; the mongrels were dusky and mottled. I then crossed one of the mongrel barb-fantails with a mongrel barb-spot, and they produced a bird of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white
double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon! We can understand these facts, on the well-known principle of reversion to ancestral
→if
all the domestic breeds
descended from the rock-pigeon. But if we deny this, we must make one of the two following highly improbable suppositions. Either,
that all the several imagined aboriginal stocks were coloured and marked like the rock-pigeon, although no other existing species
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