e greater part of our game birds, such as the
quail, pheasants, and partridges, though they appear on slight
experiments to be untamable, could probably by continuous effort be
reduced to perfect domestication. For ages they have been harried by
man in a manner which has insured a great fear of his presence. We
have indeed through our hunting instituted a very thorough-going and
continuous system of selection which has tended to affirm in these
creatures an intense fear of our kind. Only the more timorous have
escaped us, and year after year we proceed to remove with the gun the
individuals which by chance are born with any considerable share of
the primitive tolerance of man's presence. It is not to be expected
that the chicks of these species will at once accept relations with
our kind. The domestication of many of these forms is to be desired,
not only on account of the excellent quality of their flesh, but
because of their beauty and the charm which their quick intelligences
afford them. Whoever has watched them in their care of their young or
their other social habits has observed features which indicate a
possible development under domestication perhaps greater than that
which we have attained in any other of our feathered captives.

It seems most important that experiments in the further domestication of
birds should be first addressed to certain, large ground forms which are
now in more or less danger of extinction. The newly instituted industry
of ostrich farming has probably insured this the noblest remnant of the
old avian life from destruction; but the emu and the cassowary are still
among the diminishing and endangered forms which unless taken into the
human fold are likely soon to pass away. The brush turkey and the bower
bird of Australia, two of the most curious inhabitants of that realm of
strange life, appear to have qualities of mind and body which would make
them readily domesticable and which would cause them to be among the
most interesting of our feathered captives.

Among the aquatic birds there are many species which are as promising
subjects for domestication as any which have been made captive; these if
subjugated would prove great additions to our resources of ornament and
use. Thus the eider duck, so well known for its wonderful soft down
which is plucked from the breast to make a covering for the eggs, though
a marine species, would prove domesticable at least on the seashore of
high latit