Birds and their Food. 117 



shelter of trees and shrubs. While the young 

 are growing, they require incessant feeding, and 

 the food must be at hand which they can best 

 assimilate and digest ; and it does not follow that 

 this is the same as that which the parents habitu- 

 ally eat, or which the young themselves will most 

 profit by when they are fledged. The relation 

 between the movements of birds and their food 

 is a problem which has not, so far as I know, 

 been fully investigated as yet. Other problems 

 of absorbing interest at present occupy the 

 attention of men of science. The sure foothold 

 which has been gained by the theory of develop- 

 ment has placed the^ great questions of classifi- 

 cation in a new light, and brought the structure 

 of animals into the foreground ; the micro- 

 scope each year discovers new wonders in the 

 development of that structure from the earliest 

 visible germ of life, and the habits of the living 

 animal, 1 and the relations of animals to each 

 other, have consequently fallen a little into the 

 background. No ornithological researches, so far 



1 Mr. Seebohm's British Birds is a remarkable exception to 

 this tendency. 



