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Updated: May 27, 2025
If the summer visitors measured Old Phelps, he also measured them by his own standards. He used to write out what he called "short-faced descriptions" of his comrades in the woods, which were never so flattering as true.
No transitional forms between existing species are known; and known varieties, whether selected or spontaneous, never go so far as to establish new species." To this Professor Kölliker appears to attach some weight. He makes the suggestion that the short-faced tumbler pigeon may be a pathological product. No transitional forms of animals are met with among the organic remains of earlier epochs."
Moreover, I do not believe that any ornithologist would place the English carrier, the short-faced tumbler, the runt, the barb, pouter, and fantail, in the same genus; more especially as in each of these breeds several truly-inherited sub-breeds, or species, as he might have called them, could be shown him."
It is a stiff, square, red-brick dwelling-place, with long narrow windows, a high narrow door, and carved canopy; a house which savours of the Tatler and Spectator; a house in which the short-faced gentleman might have spent his summer holidays after Sir Roger's death.
Secondly, that although an English carrier or a short-faced tumbler differs immensely in certain characters from the rock-pigeon, yet that by comparing the several sub-breeds of these two races, more especially those brought from distant countries, we can make, between them and the rock-pigeon, an almost perfect series; so we can in some other cases, but not with all the breeds.
But he is described as fair to look on, broad-faced, short-faced, red-haired and much freckled, not of quick growth in his childhood. There was little love lost between him and his father, but his mother loved the boy right well. So matters sped till Grettir was ten years old, when, one day, his father told him to go and watch the geese on the farm, fifty of them, besides many goslings.
But here is the last great variety, the Tumbler; and of that great variety, one of the principal kinds, and one most prized, is the specimen represented here the short-faced Tumbler. Its beak is reduced to a mere nothing.
In tumbler pigeons, though some sub-varieties differ from the others in the important character of having a longer beak, yet all are kept together from having the common habit of tumbling; but the short-faced breed has nearly or quite lost this habit; nevertheless, without any reasoning or thinking on the subject, these tumblers are kept in the same group, because allied in blood and alike in some other respects.
But there was one remarkable exception to this rule, for the young of the short-faced tumbler differed from the young of the wild rock-pigeon and of the other breeds, in all its proportions, almost exactly as much as in the adult state. The two principles above given seem to me to explain these facts in regard to the later embryonic stages of our domestic varieties.
In the long run selection gains the day, and we do not expect to fail so completely as to breed a bird as coarse as a common tumbler pigeon from a good short-faced strain. But as long as selection is rapidly going on, much variability in the parts undergoing modification may always be expected. Now let us turn to nature.
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