certain of the accuracy of this observation.
Again, I can show that the carcasses of birds, when floating on the sea,
sometimes escape being immediately devoured; and seeds of many kinds
in the crops of floating birds long retain their vitality: peas and
vetches, for instance, are killed by even a few days' immersion in
sea-water; but some taken out of the crop of a pigeon, which had
floated on artificial salt-water for 30 days, to my surprise nearly all
germinated.

Living birds can hardly fail to be highly effective agents in the
transportation of seeds. I could give many facts showing how frequently
birds of many kinds are blown by gales to vast distances across the
ocean. We may I think safely assume that under such circumstances their
rate of flight would often be 35 miles an hour; and some authors have
given a far higher estimate. I have never seen an instance of nutritious
seeds passing through the intestines of a bird; but hard seeds of fruit
will pass uninjured through even the digestive organs of a turkey. In
the course of two months, I picked up in my garden 12 kinds of seeds,
out of the excrement of small birds, and these seemed perfect, and
some of them, which I tried, germinated. But the following fact is more
important: the crops of birds do not secrete gastric juice, and do not
in the least injure, as I know by trial, the germination of seeds;
now after a bird has found and devoured a large supply of food, it is
positively asserted that all the grains do not pass into the gizzard for
12 or even 18 hours. A bird in this interval might easily be blown to
the distance of 500 miles, and hawks are known to look out for tired
birds, and the contents of their torn crops might thus readily get
scattered. Mr. Brent informs me that a friend of his had to give up
flying carrier-pigeons from France to England, as the hawks on the
English coast destroyed so many on their arrival. Some hawks and owls
bolt their prey whole, and after an interval of from twelve to twenty
hours, disgorge pellets, which, as I know from experiments made in the
Zoological Gardens, include seeds capable of germination. Some seeds of
the oat, wheat, millet, canary, hemp, clover, and beet germinated after
having been from twelve to twenty-one hours in the stomachs of different
birds of prey; and two seeds of beet grew after having been thus
retained for two days and fourteen hours. Freshwater fish, I find, eat
seeds of many land and water pla