ce of wing-bars or of the white croup.
I then paired together two of these mongrels, namely, a brown and black
bird, and their offspring displayed wing-bars, faint, but of a darker brown
than the rest of body. In a second brood from the same parents a brown bird
was produced, with several white feathers confined to the croup.

I crossed a male dun dragon belonging to a family which had been
dun-coloured without wing-bars during several generations, with a uniform
red barb (bred from two black barbs); and the offspring presented decided
but faint traces of wing-bars. I crossed a uniform red male runt with a
white trumpeter; and the offspring had a slaty-blue tail, with a bar at the
end, and with the outer feathers edged with white. I also crossed a female
black and white chequered trumpeter (of a different strain from the last)
with a male almond-tumbler, neither of which exhibited a trace of blue, or
of the white croup, or of the bar at end of tail: nor is it probable that
the progenitors of these two birds had for many generations exhibited any
of these characters, for I have never even heard of a blue trumpeter in
this country, and my almond-tumbler was purely bred; yet the tail of this
mongrel was bluish, with a broad black bar at the end, and the croup was
perfectly white. It may be observed in several of these cases, that the
tail first shows a tendency to become by reversion blue; and this fact of
the persistency of colour in the tail and tail-coverts[344] will surprise
no one who has attended to the crossing of pigeons.

{200}

The last case which I will give is the most curious. I paired a mongrel
female barb-fantail with a mongrel male barb-spot; neither of which
mongrels had the least blue about them. Let it be remembered that blue
barbs are excessively rare; that spots, as has been already stated, were
perfectly characterized in the year 1676, and breed perfectly true; this
likewise is the case with white fantails, so much so that I have never
heard of white fantails throwing any other colour. Nevertheless the
offspring from the above two mongrels was of exactly the same blue tint as
that of the wild rock-pigeon from the Shetland Islands over the whole back
and wings; the double black wing-bars were equally conspicuous; the tail
was exactly alike in all its characters, and the croup was pure white; the
head, however, was tinted with a shade of red, evidently derived from the
spot, and was of a paler blue tha