COLUMBIDE, OR PIGEONS. Ir is a frequent, and, we think, defensible practice, with people of whatever profession or pursuit, to laud and magnify their own occupations, as of higher interest and importance than those of their neighbours. It is the same thing in relation to the different departments into which human knowledge is now divided. Each inquirer maintains the higher merit of that which he most loves, and with which he is best acquainted. In natural history, it is no doubt the very perfection of the Divine workmanship which induces each observer to feel what he cannot but regard as the surpassing dignity and worth of his own particular department. In proportion to the interest and assiduity with which things are studied, are also to the student's mind their value and importance. It is long since Dr. Chalmers instructed us in the fact, that whatever the walk of philosophy may be on which man shall enter, that is the walk which he conceives to be most enriched by all that is fitted to entertain the intellect, or arrest the admiration, of the enamoured scholar. "The astronomer," says that great divine, "who can unravel the mechanism of the heavens; or the chemist, who can trace the atomic processes of matter upon earth; or the metaphysician, who can assign the laws of human thought; or the grammarian, who can discriminate the niceties of language; or the naturalist, who can classify the flowers, and the birds, and the shells, and the minerals, and the insects, which so teem and multiply in this world of wonders ;-each of these respective inquirers is apt to become the worshipper of his own theme, and to look with a sort of indifference bordering on contempt towards what he imagines the far less interesting track of his fellow-labourers. Now, each is right in the admiration he renders to the grace and grandeur of that field which himself has explored; but all are wrong in the distaste they feel, or rather in the disregard they cast on the other fields which they have never en tered. We should take the testimony of each to the worth of that which he does know, and reject the testimony of each to the comparative worthlessness of that which he does not know; and then the unavoidable inference is, that that must be indeed a replete and a gorgeous universe in which we dwell; and still more glorious the Eternal Mind, from whose conception it arose, and whose prolific fiat gave birth to it in all its vastness and variety." We sometimes feel ourselves peculiarly placed-almost in a predicament, as it were, while endeavouring to record the beauty and excellence of different families of the feathered race. They are all, in truth, made up of such exquisite materials that each, while we view itself alone, seems to be about the fairest thing on earth; and so, if we should now say that the pigeon tribe are the most beautiful of birds, no doubt some tenacious reader of "Excelsior" may possibly be able to point out that we have already said the same thing both of Parrots and Humming-birds. We cannot help it. At present pigeons actually are the most beautiful birds with which we are acquainted. Their bills are more slender and delicately formed than those of parrots, their eyes more mild and gentle, their voices more plaintive and melodious, their forms, from the smallness of their heads, more proportionate and better balanced, their gait easier, and their gestures more graceful. Though less splendidly metallic than humming-birds, they fill the eye more fully from their ample size; and, in consequence of their hardier constitution, they occur in almost every quarter of the globe, thus dispensing their radiance not alone beneath the brilliant sunlight of the tropics, but in far northern cloudy lands, irradiating many a dark-browed cliff "With lustre of a saintly show." Pigeons present a vast disparity among themselves as * "On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man," (Bridgewater Treatise), vol. ii. p. 173. THEIR PECULIARITIES. 291 regards both size and general aspect, although there is a certain family likeness which, as in all natural groups, pervades the entire assemblage. There is one species scarcely larger than a lark, while another seems almost as big as a small turkey. They are all distinguished by their great power of swift and long-continued flight. They are invariably monogamous, that is, associated in pairs; and both sexes take a share in the hatching of the eggs, which, with few exceptions, are only two in number. They build on trees, rocks, or ruins, according to their kind. The young are fed after a somewhat peculiar fashion. The crop of the parents is furnished with numerous glands, which become developed during incubation. These glands secrete a kind of milky matter, with which the food received into the crop is moistened, and afterwards regurgitated into the mouths of the offspring. The position of pigeons in systematic ornithology is somewhat unsettled. By Cuvier, and many other modern writers, they have been placed among the gallinaceous tribes; that is, poultry, game birds, &c. But both in general aspect and particular modes of life, they are very dissimilar. We need not further allude to their surpassing powers of flight, so different from the terrestrial habits of those just named. The very limited number of their eggs, the alternate incubation of these by both parents, and the helpless condition in which the young are hatched, are facts in their constitutional history which we fail to find in that of the Gallina. At the same time species occur, as we shall ere long notice, of an aberrant character, which certainly connect them more or less with the gallinaceous groups. The old and unrestricted genus COLUMBA is one of the largest and most widely-spread with which naturalists are. acquainted. It is diffused alike over Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia, New Guinea, Malacca, the Celebes, |