The Woodhewer Family. 241 
or four inches beneath the surface with its immense 
curved probing beak. 
Again, when we consider a large number of 
species of different groups, we find that there is 
not with the Tree-creepers, as with most families, 
any special habit or manner of life linking them 
together; but that, on the contrary, different 
genera, and, very frequently, different species 
belonging to one genus, possess habits peculiarly 
their own. In other families, even where the 
divergence is greatest, what may be taken as the 
original or ancestral habit is seldom or never quite 
obsolete in any of the members. This we see, for 
instance, in the woodpeckers, some of which have 
acquired the habit of seeking their food exclusively 
on the ground in open places, and even of nesting 
in the banks of streams. Yet all these wanderers, 
even those which have been structurally modified 
in accordance with their altered way of life, retain 
the primitive habit of clinging vertically to the 
trunks of trees, although the habit has lost its 
use. With the tyrant birds—a family showing an 
extraordinary amount of variation—it is the same; 
for the most divergent kinds are frequently seen 
reverting to the family habit of perching on an 
elevation, from which to make forays after passing 
insects, returning after each capture to the same 
stand. The thrushes, ranging all over the globe, 
afford another striking example. Without speaking 
of their nesting habits, their relationship appears in 
their love of fruit, in their gait, flight, statuesque 
attitudes, and abrupt motions. 
With the numerous Dendrocolaptine groups, so 
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