SOME HYOID HINTS 



One of the unaccountable prejudices har- 

 bored for centuries in the human mind is that 

 against certain harmless reptiles, birds, and 

 other animals. It would be easy to fill many 

 pages with a catalogue of the victims suffer- 

 ing from this curious obliquity of judgment 

 on the part of intelligent and even cultured 

 people. The feeling against non-venomous 

 reptiles may be attributed, with some stretch 

 of the truth, to the disgust engendered by 

 ugliness ; but there would appear to be no intel- 

 ligible foundation whatever for the prejudice 

 against certain birds. The cat-bird, for in- 

 stance, a beautiful, useful, and charmingly 

 musical little creature, naturally inclined to 

 love man and to serve him, has been almost 

 universally despised by those who ought 

 to love it and defend it. The yellow-billed 

 cuckoo is another singularly unfortunate bird 

 in this regard. In the Southern States espe- 

 cially it is the subject of great slander. But 

 there is, perhaps, no other family of birds 

 which, in America at least, has been subjected 

 to such unmitigated, baseless persecution as 

 that to which the family of woodpeckers has 

 submitted within the present century, and 

 falling, too, from the hands of the most en- 

 lightened populace on the globe. So deep- 

 rooted is this popular prejudice against the 

 woodpecker that one may be sure of eliciting 

 an expression of surprise, if not of contempt, 

 from almost any audience, by remarking upon 

 the beauty of any species of the bird. Or- 

 nithologists have often noted this, and no 

 part of the prejudice has originated with 

 tiiem, indeed no bird has been studied mpre 



