In order to understand how the chief domestic races have become distinctly separated from each other, it is important to bear in mind, that fanciers constantly try to breed from the best birds, and consequently that those which are inferior in the requisite qualities are in each generation neglected; so that after a time the less improved parent-stocks and many subsequently formed intermediate grades become extinct. This has occurred in the case of the pouter, turbit, and trumpeter, for these highly improved breeds are now left without any links closely connecting them either with each other or with the aboriginal rock-pigeon. In other countries, indeed, where the same care has not been applied, or where the same fashion has not prevailed, the earlier forms may long remain unaltered or altered only in a slight degree, and we are thus sometimes enabled to recover the connecting links. This is the case in Persia and India with the tumbler and carrier, which there differ but slightly from the rock-pigeon in the {220} proportions of their beaks. So again in Java, the fantail sometimes has only fourteen caudal feathers, and the tail is much less elevated and expanded than in our improved birds; so that the Java bird forms a link between a first-rate fantail and the rock-pigeon. Occasionally a breed may be retained for some particular quality in a nearly unaltered condition in the same country, together with highly modified offshoots or sub-breeds, which are valued for some distinct property. We see this exemplified in England, where the common tumbler, which is valued only for its flight, does not differ much from its parent-form, the Eastern tumbler; whereas the short-faced tumbler has been prodigiously modified, from being valued, not for its flight, but for other qualities. But the common-flying tumbler of Europe has already begun to branch out into slightly different sub-breeds, such as the common English tumbler, the Dutch roller, the Glasgow house-tumbler, and the long-faced beard tumbler, &c.; and in the course of centuries, unless fashions greatly change, these sub-breeds will diverge through the slow and insensible process of unconscious selection, and become modified, in a greater and greater degree. After a time the perfectly graduated links, which now connect all these sub-breeds together, will be lost, for there would be no object and much difficulty in retaining such a host of intermediate sub-varieties.