Moreover, when birds belonging to two or more distinct breeds are crossed, none of which are blue or have any of the above-specified marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt suddenly to acquire these characters.

To give one instance out of several which I have observed: I crossed some white fantails, which breed very true, with some black barbs--and it so happens that blue varieties of barbs are so rare that I never heard of an instance in England; and the mongrels were black, brown and mottled.

I also crossed a barb with a spot, which is a white bird with a red tail and red spot on the forehead, and which notoriously breeds very true; the mongrels were dusky and mottled.

I then crossed one of the mongrel barb-fantails with a mongrel barb-spot, and they produced a bird of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white loins, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon! We can understand these facts, on the well-known principle of reversion to ancestral characters, if all the domestic breeds are descended from the rock-pigeon.

But if we deny this, we must make one of the two following highly improbable suppositions.