ock-pigeon; the terminal bar, however, was absent, but the outer
feathers were edged with white: a second and third nearly resembled the
first, but the tail in both presented a trace of the bar at the end: a
fourth was brownish, and the wings showed a trace of the double bar: a
fifth was pale blue over the whole breast, back, croup, and tail, but the
neck and primary wing-feathers were reddish; the wings presented two
distinct bars of a red colour; the tail was not barred, but the outer
feathers were edged with white. I crossed this last curiously coloured bird
with a black mongrel of complicated descent, namely, from a black barb, a
spot, and almond tumbler, so that the two young birds produced from this
cross included the blood of five varieties, none of which had a trace of
blue or of wing and tail bars: one of the two young birds was
brownish-black, with black wing-bars; the other was reddish-dun, with
reddish wing-bars, paler than the rest of the body, with the croup pale
blue, the tail bluish, with a trace of the terminal bar.

Mr. Eaton[342] matched two short-faced tumblers, namely, a splash cock and
kite hen (neither of which are blue or barred), and from the first nest he
got a perfect blue bird, and from the second a silver or pale blue bird,
both of which, in accordance with all analogy, no doubt presented the usual
characteristic marks.

I crossed two male black barbs with two female red spots. These latter have
the whole body and wings white, with a spot on the forehead, the tail and
tail-coverts red; the race existed at least as long ago as 1676, and now
breeds perfectly true, as was known to be the case in the year 1735.[343]
Barbs are uniformly-coloured birds, with rarely even a trace of bars on the
wing or tail; they are known to breed very true. The mongrels thus raised
were black or nearly black, or dark or pale brown, {199} sometimes slightly
piebald with white: of these birds no less than six presented double
wing-bars; in two the bars were conspicuous and quite black; in seven some
white feathers appeared on the croup; and in two or three there was a trace
of the terminal bar to the tail, but in none were the outer tail-feathers
edged with white.

I crossed black barbs (of two excellent strains) with purely-bred,
snow-white fantails. The mongrels were generally quite black, with a few of
the primary wing and tail-feathers white: others were dark reddish-brown,
and others snow-white: none had a tra