The map in Fig. 1 gives the approximate system such as it results from documents consulted in foreign military reviews.
According to Lieutenant Grigot, an officer of the Belgian army, who has written a very good book entitled Science Colombophile, a rational organization of the French system requires a central station at Paris and three secondary centers at Langres, Lyons and Tours, the latter being established in view of a new invasion.
As the distance of Paris from the frontier of the north is but 143 miles at the most, the city would have no need of any intermediate station in order to communicate with the various places of the said frontier. Langres would serve as a relay between Paris and the frontier of the northeast. For the places of the southeast it would require at least two relays, Lyons and Langres, or Dijon.
As Paris has ten directions to serve, it should therefore possess ten different dove cotes, of 720 birds each, and this would give a total of 7,200 pigeons. According to the same principle, Langres, which has five directions to provide for, should have 3,600 pigeons.
Continuing this calculation, we find that it would require 25,000 pigeons for the dove cotes as a whole appropriated to the frontiers of the north, northeast, east, and southeast, without taking into account our frontiers of the ocean and the Pyrenees.
FIG. 2.—BASKET FOR CARRYING PIGEONS.
A law of the 3d of July, 1877, supplemented by a decree of the 15th of November, organized the application of carrier pigeons in France.
One of the last enumerations shows that there exist in Paris 11,000 pigeons, 5,000 of which are trained, and, in the suburbs, 7,000, of which 3,000 are trained. At Roubaix, a city of 100,000 inhabitants, there are 15,000 pigeons. Watrelos, a small neighboring city of 10,000 inhabitants, has no less than 3,000 carrier pigeons belonging to three societies, the oldest of which, that of Saint-Esprit, was founded in 1869.