34 NUMBER AND SHAPE OF REMIGES. 
extremes of the mode of flight result. The short, round wing confers a 
heavy, powerful, cutting flight, for short distances, with a whirring noise, 
produced by quick vibrations of the wing: birds that fly thus are almost 
always thickset and heavy. The long, pointed wing gives a light, airy, 
skimming flight, indefinitely prolonged, with little or no noise, as the wing 
beats are more deliberate: birds of this style of wing are generally trim 
and elegant. These, of course, are merely generalizations, mixed and ob- 
scured in every degree in actual bird-life. Thus the humming-bird, with 
long pointed wings, whirs them fastest of all birds; so fast that the eye can- 
not follow the strokes, and merely perceives a mist on each side of the bird. 
The combination of a pointed with a somewhat concave shape of wing is a 
remarkably strong one; it results in a rapid, vigorous, whistling flight, as in 
a pigeon or duck. An ample wing, as it is called, that is, one long as well 
as broad, without being pointed, is seen in the herons; it confers a slow and 
somewhat lumbering, but still strong, flight. The longest winged birds are 
found among the swimmers, as albatrosses; but here the extreme length is 
largely produced by the length of the humerus ; some land birds, as swallows, 
swifts, humming-birds, and other fissirostral birds, would have a still longer 
wing, were not the humerus extraordinarily short. The shortest wings 
(among birds with perfect remiges), occur in the lowest swimmers, as among 
the auks and divers, and in the gallinaceous birds. The various special 
shapes of wings are too numerous and too insensibly gradated to be men- 
tioned here. The mechanics of ordinary flying’ are probably now under- 
stood,* though the “way of an eagle in the air” was an enigma to the wise 
man of old. But the sailing of some birds for an indefinite period through 
the air, up as well as down, without visible motion of the wings, remains a 
stumbling-block ; the flight of the turkey vulture is yet unexplained, I ven- 
ture to afirm. 
(b.) The number of remiges ranges from sixteen, in the humming-bird, 
to upwards of fifty, in the albatross. This statement is exclusive of the 
penguins, in which there are no true remiges. The remiges subserve flight 
in nearly all existing birds except these last, the ostriches and their allies, 
and the great auk, Alca émpennis—if indeed this bird still lives. 
(c.) Of the shape of remiges there is little to be said, they are, with few 
exceptions, so uniform. They are the stiffest, strongest, most truly penna- 
ceous (§ 4) of a bird’s feathers ; they have no evident hyporhachis (§ 3, a) ; 
they are generally lanceolate, that is, taper regularly and gradually to a 
rounded point. Sometimes one or both webs are incised or attenuate 
towards the end, that is, they narrow abruptly ; this is also called emargina- 
tion. (See fig.110.) The tips of the remiges may be squarely or obliquely 
cut off, as it were, or nicked in various ways. Except in the case of a few 
of the innermost remiges, their outer vexillum (§ 3, a2) is always narrower 
*The student should not fail to consult, in this connection, M. Marey’s ‘Lectures on the Phenomena of 
Flight,” Smithsonian Report for 1869, p. 226. (Translated from Revwe des Cours Scientifiques.) 
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