636 CAPRIMULGUS EUROPiEUS. 



goats in its attempts to milk them, and thus it received the 

 names of Caprimulgus and Aegotheles, which, having been 

 translated into the modern tongues, it retains at the present day. 

 Then it was accused of being so awkward as to be obliged to 

 fly with its mouth wide open in order to catch its insect prey, 

 and so slovenly as to need an instrument on its foot with which 

 to brush from its beard the fragments of its food. Nay, so de- 

 termined have its historians been to misrepresent it, as to hint 

 that it cannot see like other birds, but is obliged first to gape, 

 and then direct its eyes downward, to look through the roof of 

 its mouth, for which purpose that part was made thin and 

 transparent. Now, these fancies it would be idle to refute, 

 were it not that some of them find a place in the works of phi- 

 losophers considered to be of a higher character, and whom I 

 have been censured for designating as compilers. Therefore it 

 is that I shall refute them. I have examined the mouth and 

 eye in four species of this genus, and what I have to state 

 here I have already stated in the fifth volume of Mr Audu- 

 bon''s Ornithological Biography. In all of them the space be- 

 tween the palatal ridges and the edges of the mandibles is 

 covered with a very thin diaphanous membrane, covering the 

 eye and the cavity of the nose. It is this transparency of the 

 roof of the mouth that has given rise to the idea of its being 

 possible or probable that the bird may direct its eyes so as to 

 look through the palate. But the palate is not so transparent 

 as to enable an ornithologist looking through it to read the 

 title-page of his own book ; and therefore much less to enable 

 a bird in the dark or the dusk to discern an insect fluttering in 

 the air. Besides the eye is fixed in its orbit, nearly as strictly 

 as that of an owl, and thus cannot be turned round, which 

 moreover it could only be were it globular, which it is not, it 

 being much depressed, convex only at the base, but having the 

 sides anteriorly concave, owing to the curvature of the sclero- 

 tic bones ; so that the eye, being naturally directed outward, 

 were the bird to turn it forward and inward, one half of it 

 would project out of its socket, and some of the muscles would 

 be lacerated, unless constructed on a different plan. This I 

 think is common sense. The notion of a bird's flying about 



