50 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis 



from viacro, loii^, and cJiir, hand, established by Nitzsch 

 in 1829, an order well defined by anatomical characters. 

 It is remarkable that, though so much like Swallows in 

 many respects externally, the Swifts have scarcely any 

 part of the structure which is not formed on a dilTcrent 

 plan. The Swallow family is a good member of the 

 Oscines or Song Birds, a suborder of the order Passcres 

 or Perching Birds. There is only one other suborder of 

 the Passeres, the Clamatores or Songless Perching Birds, 

 to which belong in North America only the Flycatcher 

 family, Tiiramiidae, while the Oscines comprise all 

 the rest of the small land birds with the excep- 

 tion of tile Woodpeckers, Cuckoos and Kingfishers, 

 which form orders by themselves. The order Passeres 

 exceeds by far all other orders in number of species, of 

 which there are over 9,000, as many as of all other orders 

 put together. 



The Macrochires of the United States are divided into 

 three suborders: Caprimulgi, Goatsuckers; Cypseli, 

 Swifts, and Trochili, Ilunmiingbirds ; the first two are 

 fissirostral or birds with deej)ly cleft gai^es, and the lat- 

 ter tenn'irostral or birds ^^^th slender bill. C'j/pseli is 

 taken from the (ireek word ^'V'"?*", Swift, from tlu'lr rapi«l- 

 ity of flight. The suborder Cijpseli is again divided into 

 families and subfamilies. Our Chimney Swift belongs 

 to the subfamily Chaetur'niae or Spine-tailed Swifts of 

 the family Micropodidae, also called Cypselidae, of which 

 there are nine genera and seventy-eight species. The 

 four species of Swifts of the Ignited Stattv'^ belong to 

 three genera, two of which are only found in the western 

 United States, the P.lack ST\*ift and the White-throated 

 Swift; the third genus, to which our Swift belongs, is 

 represented on the Pacific Coast by the Vaux's Swift, a 

 much smaller l)ird, but of similar habits. 



The Swifts are found all over the globe and are well 

 represented in America, but some genera are exclusively 

 East Indian and Polvnesian. All have the salivary 



