Mr. A. R. Wallace on the Natural Arrangement of Birds. 201 



the Indian Archipelago at least) entirely frugivorous ; and it is 

 curious to observe how their structure modifies their mode of 

 feeding. They are far too heavy to dart after the fruit in the 

 manner of the Trogons; they cannot even fly quickly from 

 branch to branch, picking a fruit here and a fruit there ; neither 

 have they strength or agility enough to venture on the more 

 slender branches with the Pigeons and Barbets, but they alight 

 heavily on a branch of considerable thickness, and then, looking 

 cautiously round them, pick off any fruits that may be within 

 their reach, and jerk them down their throat by a motion similar 

 to that used by the Toucans, and which has been erroneously 

 described as throwing the fruit up in the air before swallowing 

 it. When they have gathered all within their reach, they move 

 sideways along the branch by short jumps, or rather a kind of 

 shuffle, and the smaller species even hop across to other branches, 

 when they again gather what is within their reach. When in 

 this way they have progressed as far as the bough will safely 

 carry them, they take a flight to another part of the tree, where 

 they .pursue the same course. It thus happens that they soon 

 exhaust all the fruit within their reach ; and long after they have 

 left a tree, the Barbets and Eurylaimi find abundance of food 

 on the slender branches and extreme twigs. We see, therefore, 

 that their very short legs and syndactyle feet remove them com- 

 pletely from the vicinity of the Toucans, in which the legs 

 are actively employed in moving about after their food. Their 

 wings, too, are as powerful as those of the Toucans are weak, 

 and it is only the great weight of their bodies that prevents them 

 from being capable of rapid and extensive flight. As it is, their 

 strength of wing is shown by the great force with which they 

 beat the air, producing a sound, in the larger species, which can 

 be distinctly heard a mile off, and is even louder than that made 

 by the flight of the great Muscovy Duck. They are still farther 

 removed from the Crows, with which they have also been very 

 generally associated, solely because they are Couirostres, or conic- 

 beaked ! — another instance of the extremely erroneous results 

 which are arrived at by a dependence on a single character, and 

 especially on one which so little influences the habits of a bird 

 as the external form of its bilL 



The preceding deductions from the habits of these birds had 

 been made before I became aware that Mr. Eyton had arrived at 

 similar results from anatomical considerations alone ; and I had 

 great pleasure in finding that there was such solid support for 

 the opinion which I had formed, entirely from my own observa- 

 tions. The only question that remains then is, to what family 

 of the Fissirostres do they most nearly approach ? A careful 

 consideration leads us to fix upon the Kingfishers. They are 

 among the largest birds in the group, they have the largest bills. 



