JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
What I know for sure about the future vision of canaries can be summarized very quickly: if it was 150 years ago, and you were a miner, and you were down in the mines, and the canary being carried in the cage in front of you suddenly keeled over and died, it was a very good indicator that if you didn’t get out of the mine very quickly that your future would be extremely limited. I’m guessing that ths canary was trained to retrieve a bit of paper for some cotter, to the delight of the young observer. On the other hand it is at least as good as 99% of other sources of predicting future events.
[Source: “Prying into the future– telling fortunes with canaries– a life sketch in the metropolis (1878)”, New York Public Library Digital Collections, here.]