180 Some Colony Birds. 



colony and include macaws, parrots (so-called), paroquets and 

 love-birds. I may say in passing that it is a fault of our 

 language that we have to call, not only parrots, parrots; but 

 the whole tribe of Psitiacidae : macaws, cockatoos, lories, 

 paroquets, love-birds and the reft. The same defect is found 

 in other departments of Zoology; thus we call apes, baboons, 

 gibbons, and the rest, monkeys, as well as monkeys proper. 



The word " parrot " is derived from the French " pier- 

 rot " : the French call the bird "Little Peter," just as we 

 call it "Pretty Poll." Parrots have more brain, proportion- 

 ately, than any other bird, their upper beak or maxilla, 

 unlike that of any other bird except the flamingo, is movable 

 and not anchylosed to the skull. The tongue is thick and 

 generally black, the eye intelligent and the pupil often highly 

 dilatable. The feet, in common with cuckoos, toucans, wood- 

 peckers, and a few others, are zygodactyl (Greek " yoked 

 fingers ") having two claws before and twoi behind; the 

 outer claw i s forced back into what is evidently a primarily 

 unnatural position. I might remark that the word zygodactyl 

 would be more applicable to thid chameleon, the claws of 

 which are not only disposed in this way, but those before 

 and those behind are actually joined together. We have 

 here an evident sign of evolution; it was necessary for 

 climbing biids \o Jiase as firm a grip behind as before and so 

 nature accommodated itself to their need. 



Evolution as an active force in organic beings is too 

 evident to every student of nature to be gainsaid; but that 

 it has effected all that Darwinians would have us believe, is 

 precisely what thinking men are beginning more and more 

 strongly to deny. Many facts that seem at the outset to lead 

 to evolution are like blind alleys; they go a certain way in 

 the right direction and then suddenly terminate in a blank 

 wall. Ruskin, approaching the subject in. a rhetorical rather 

 than a scientific mood, writes: "Had Darwinism been true, 

 we should have split our heads in two with foolish thinking, 

 or thrust out from above our covetous hearts a hundred de- 

 sirous arms and clutching hands and changed ourselves into 

 Briarean cephalopods. . . ." He is in a more scientific 

 temper when, writing of the supposed evolution of the pea- 



