260 The Naturalist in La Plata. 
honey-eaters and humming birds—we might have 
expected to find in the Dendrocolaptide a better 
imitation of the woodpecker in so variable an organ 
as the beak, if not in the tongue. 
Probably the oven-birds, and their nearest re- 
lations—generalized, hardy, builders of strong nests, 
and prolific—represent the parental form; and 
when birds of this type had spread over the entire 
continent they became in different districts fre- 
quenters of marshes, forests, thickets and savannas. 
With altered life-habits the numerous divergent 
forms originated ; some, like Xiphorynchus, retain- 
ing a probing beak in a wonderfully modified form, 
attenuated in an extreme degree, and bent like a 
sickle ; others diverging more in the direction of 
nuthatches and woodpeckers. 
This sketch of the Dendrocolaptide, necessarily 
slight and imperfect, is based on a knowledge of 
the habits of about sixty species, belonging to 
twenty-eight genera: from personal observation 
IT am acquainted with less than thirty species. It 
is astonishing to find how little has been written 
about these most interesting birds in South America. 
One tree-creeper only, Furnarius rufus, the oven- 
bird par excellence, has been mentioned, on account 
of its wonderful architecture, in almost every 
general work of natural history published during 
the present century; yet the oven-bird does not 
surpass, or even equal in interest, many others in 
this family of nearly three hundred members. 
