74 THE WINGS. 



ingly find a spread and power of wing truly astonish- 

 ing. We cannot take a better example than our common 

 Swift, the largest of our Swallow tribe, whose well- 

 known scream and rapid flight must be familiar to every 

 one. It has to seek its livelihood solely in the air, on 

 insects so small that we can with difficulty perceive them, 

 even if slowly passing before our eyes. It could not 

 therefore live a day, unless gifted with extraordinary 

 powers of flight; it must not only be able to move 

 rapidly forward in a straight line, but also be able to 

 turn as quick as thought to the right or left, upwards or 

 downwards, to catch its minute prey. And such is the 

 case; the bird is so light that it weighs little more than 

 an ounce, and yet the spread of its wings, from tip to 

 tip, is not less than eighteen inches. But extraordinary 

 as these proportions are, in length of wing, compared 

 with weight, in this our British species, they are ex- 

 ceeded in a newly discovered species in the East Indies, 

 called the Javanese Crested Swallow*, whose uncommon 

 length of wing indicates a speed far beyond that of our 

 Swift. Other birds, again, there are, which require 

 additional powers, not in the air, but under water, their 

 food consisting entirely of the fish they are enabled to 

 catch, by diving after them with greater speed than the 

 fish can swim. Here it is evident, a long wide-spreading 

 wing, like the Swift's, would be very inconvenient; accord- 

 ingly, in birds of this tribe, we find the wings much 

 smaller, and so formed that they can be used as oars or 

 fins, which in one division of the Penguin tribe they 

 very much resemble, the short feathery covering upon 

 them having much the appearance of scales. Of the 

 true Penguins we have none in this country, but we 

 have, however, many species even in England, which live 

 on fish, having wings, if not so much like fins as those of 

 the Penguins, at least so very small, comparatively speak- 

 ing, that we may refer to them, as illustrations of the 

 subject before us, we mean the Divers or Grebes, one 



* Macropterjx longipennis. 



