138 VICIDM. 



climbing, with two toes before and two behind, rarely with only a single 

 toe behind ; the two anterior toes connected together at the base, the two 

 posterior toes entirely free. 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 third 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 de- 

 scribed. In our British Birds eight genera, forming three 

 families, belong to the Scansores, commencing with the 

 Picidtz, or family of the Woodpeckers. 



The Great Black Woodpecker was added to the cata- 

 logue of British Birds on the authority of Dr. Latham, 

 who said he had been informed that it had occasionally 

 been seen in Devonshire and the southern parts of the king- 

 dom. Dr. Pulteney, 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 Whitchurch. Montagu, in his Supplement, says, 

 " Lord Stanley assures us that he shot a Picus martins 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, for- 

 merly in the collection of Mr. Donovan, was affirmed to 

 have been shot in this country. At the sale of Mr. 

 Donovan's collection, this specimen was purchased by the 

 late Earl Derby, and is now in the Derby Museum, at 

 Liverpool. 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 



