CARRIER, a person who carries goods for others for hire. By the law of Scotland, carriers fall within the intendment of the edict of the Roman praetor, entitled Nau-tae, Caupones, Stabularii, which has, with some variations, been adopted into the municipal system of that country, and according to which an obligation arises, without formal paction, merely by a traveller’s entering an inn, ship, or stable, and there depositing his goods, or putting up his horse; whereby an innkeeper, shipmaster, or stabler, is accountable, not only for his acts and those of his servants, but also for those of the other guests or passengers, and, indeed, in every case, unless where the goods have been lost damno fatali, or carried off by pirates or housebreakers. The precise extent of the obligation in the case of carriers, however, is not very clearly defined; and in practice various devices have been resorted to in order to evade it altogether.

Carrier- Pigeon or Courier-Pigeon, a sort of pigeon, used, when properly trained, to carry letters from one place to another. See Columba, Ornithology.

Though you carry these birds hood-winked, twenty, thirty, nay sixty or a hundred miles, they will find their way in a very little time to the place where they were bred. They are trained to this service in Turkey and Persia; and are carried first, while young, short flights of half a mile, afterwards more, till at length they will return from the farthest part of the kingdom. Every pasha has a basket of these pigeons bred in the seraglio, which, upon any emergent occasion, as an insurrection, or the like, he 'dispatches, with letters braced under the wings, to the seraglio. This proves a more speedy method, as well as a safer one, than any other; he sends out more than one pigeon, however, for fear of accidents. Lithgow assures us that one of these birds will carry a letter from Babylon to Aleppo, which is thirty days’ journey, in forty-eight hours. This was also a very ancient practice. Hirtius and Brutus, at the siege of Modena, held a correspondence with one another by means of pigeons. And Ovid tells us that Taurosthenes, by a pigeon stained with purple, gave notice to his father of his victory at the Olympic games, sending it to him at Aegina.

In modern times, the most noted were the pigeons of Aleppo, which served as couriers at Alexandretta and Bagdad. But this use of them has been laid aside for the last thirty or forty years, because the Curd robbers killed the pigeons. The manner of sending advice by them was this: They took pairs which had young ones, and carried them on horseback to the place whence they wished them to return, taking care to let them have a full view. When the news arrived, the correspondent tied a billet to [7:6:177]the pigeon’s foot, and let her loose. The bird, impatient to see its young, flew off like lightning, and arrived at Aleppo in ten hours from Alexandretta, and in two days from Bagdad. It was not difficult for them to find their way back, since Aleppo may be discovered at an immense distance. This pigeon has nothing very peculiar in its form, except its nostrils, which, instead of being smooth and even, are swelled and rough.

In this country there seem to be two other varieties of pigeon frequently used as messengers, namely, the horseman and dragoon. The following faet is related of the last-named variety. A gentleman sent a dragoon by the stage-coach to a friend at St Edmunds Bury, along with a note, desiring that the bird, two days after its arrival there, might be thrown up into the air precisely as the town clock struck nine in the morning. This was accordingly done, and the pigeon was observed to fly into a loft in Bishopsgate Street, London, at half past eleven of the same morning, having flown, probably without any violent exertion, seventy-two miles in two hours and a half.

Carrier-pigeons are still used to carry occasional dispatches from the Bell Rock light-house to the northern shore of the Frith of Forth. They refuse, however, to leave the light-house during hazy weather; and as in this country considerable training seems necessary, the feats of these aerial messengers, though very admirable, are not so purely instinctive, and consequently not so unerring, as is usually supposed.