128 PICID.E. 



anterior toes connected together at the base, the two posterior toes entirely fiee. 

 Tail of ten or twelve feathers, the outside one the shortest, the others more or 

 less graduated, the shafts strong, elastic, and pointed. 



The subjects of the tliird division of the Insessores, or 

 Perching Birds, are the Scansores, or Climbers ; a division, 

 which, as its name implies, includes all those birds remark- 

 able for their power of climbing, to accomplish which most of 

 them have their toes arranged in pairs, or two opposed to 

 two, but with some modifications, to be hereafter described. 

 In our British Birds eight genera, forming three families, 

 belong to the Scansores, commencing with the Picidie, or 

 family of the Woodpeckers. 



The Great Black Woodpecker was added to the catalogue 

 of British Birds on the authority of Dr. Latham, who said he 

 had been informed that it had occasionally been seen in De- 

 vonshire and the southern parts of the kingdom. Dr. Pulte- 

 ney, in his Catalogue of the Birds of Dorsetshire, notices the 

 Great Black Woodpecker as having been more than once 

 killed in that county : one in particular is said to have been 

 shot in the nursery at Blandford, and another at W^hitchurch. 

 Montagu, in his Supplement, says, " Lord Stanley assures 

 us that he shot a Picus martius in Lancashire ; and we have 

 heard that another was shot in the winter of 1805 on the 

 trunk of a tree in Battersea Fields." The specimen of the 

 Black Woodpecker, formerly in the collection of Mr. Dono- 

 van, who was well known to give very high prices for rare 

 British-killed birds, for his own use in his History of British 

 Ornithology, this example was affirmed to have been shot in 

 this country. At the sale of Mr. Donovan's collection, this 

 specimen was purchased by Earl Derby, and is now at 

 Knowsley. I have been told of two instances of the Black 

 Woodpecker having been killed in Yorkshire, but the birds 

 falling into the hands of those who were not aware of the 

 Ornithological interest attached to them, the specimens were 



