MATED BIRDS THE BEST.
Once a male bird has regularly mated he will fly back to his duties as a husband and father as fast as he can. These duties are serious and practical, for the male bird bears his full share in sitting upon the eggs and in feeding the nestlings when hatched, for which purpose both cock and hen possess special faculties and functions. The homing tendency acts best when it is entirely concentrated. For example, it has been found that a mated pair will not fly home together with anything like proper certainty. They stop and dally by the way; they behave like holiday people who have "got somebody to mind the babies."
In order to have trustworthy messengers for war or peace the pigeons must not be bachelors nor loafers nor be flown with associates; they must be the respectable mated birds with establishments, so that in employing them for war messengers one actually presses domestic virtue, as well as love and parental instinct, into the service of the military.
But even the peaceful pigeon can be sometimes pugnacious on his own account, and a jealous fantail, or tumbler, or Antwerp, or Jacobin often will conduct himself like a game cock, though painters and poets from time immemorial have agreed to regard this bird as the natural emblem of gentleness and peace. It is the accepted token of the Holy Spirit, "which descended in the form of a dove." All literatures are full of this thought.
PIGEONS IN LEGEND AND STORY.
The Arabs have a story that when an angel of Allah offered to King Solomon the water of immortality in a ruby cup it was a dove that dissuaded him from drinking it, and thereby from living mournfully to survive those whom he loved in an earth grown desolate and lonely. And it was because of the maternal courage of a dove which had followed its captive nestlings all the way to the prophet's house that Mohammed instituted that merciful decree which still prevails all over the East, and which forbids true believers to touch or even to taste of the flesh of any creature which has not been "hallalled"; that is to say, over which, while alive, the prayer of pardonable bloodshed has not been uttered.
The birds, gentle and stainless, which Sappho sang of, harnessed to the golden chariot of the "Splendor-throned Queen, immortal Aphrodite," in some cases have been converted into messengers of death and ruin. Some hold that this is better than to see them immolated for prizes by unsportsmanlike gunners at Monte Carlo and such places, for the birds remain unaware of their new duties, and carry messages from a beleaguered fortress, or the call for aid from a sinking warship, or the state of a suffering patient, alike carelessly and ignorantly, as if the missives tied to their feet were perfumed messages sent by lovers.
USED BY PHYSICIANS.
In the early '90s Dr. S. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia used pigeons in the case of a patient ill of nerve fatigue, several miles from his home, thus accomplishing two purposes—a daily report and the salutary effect of leading the worn mind of the patient into a new channel.
Dr. Philip Arnold, in a recent medical journal, tells of receiving messages from his patients in the country every day, in addition to his daily visits to them. His plan usually is to leave a pigeon the day he makes a visit, and direct that the pigeon be liberated the next day with such a message as he requires. With a little care in the instruction of the nurse, he is informed of the condition of the patient before he starts to make his next visit. In a country practice this is important, since it enables the physician to judge what will be needed for his patient in the next twenty-four hours, and the country physician usually is his own druggist.