. 



GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER. 25 



sooth, the whole family of Woodpeckers must look sad, sour, and 

 be miserable, to satisfy the caprice of a whimsical philosopher, 

 who takes it into his head that they are, and ought to be, so. 



But the count is not the only European who has misrepre- 

 sented and traduced this beautiful bird. One has given him 

 brown legs,* another a yellow neck;t a third has declared him 

 a Cuckoo,! and in an English translation of Linnaeus's System 

 of Nature, lately published, he is characterized as follows: 

 " transversely striate with black and gray ; chin and breast black; 

 does not climb trees;" which is just as correct as if, in describ- 

 ing the human species, we should say skin striped with black 

 and green; cheeks blue; chin orange; never walks on foot, &c. 

 The pages of natural history should resemble a faithful mirror, 

 in which mankind may recognize the true images of the living 

 originals; instead of which we find this department of them, too 

 often, like the hazy and rough medium of wretched window 

 glass, through whose crooked protuberances every thing ap- 

 pears so strangely distorted, that one scarcely knows their most 

 intimate neighbours and acquaintance. 



The Golden-winged Woodpecker has the back and wings 

 above of a dark umber, transversely marked with equidistant 

 streaks of black; upper part of the head an iron gray; cheeks and 

 parts surrounding the eyes, a fine cinnamon colour; from the 

 lower mandible a strip of black, an inch in length, passes down 

 each side of the throat, and a lunated spot, of a vivid blood red, 

 covers the hindhead, its two points reaching within half an inch 

 of each eye; the sides of the neck, below this, incline to a bluish 

 gray; throat and chin a very light cinnamon or fawn colour; 

 the breast is ornamented with a broad crescent of deep black; 

 the belly and vent white, tinged with yellow, and scattered with 

 innumerable round spots of black, every feather having a distinct 

 central spot, those on the thighs and vent being heart-shaped 

 and largest; the lower or inner side of the wing and tail, shafts 

 of all the larger feathers, and indeed of almost every feather, 



* See Encycl. Brit. Art. Picus. f LATHAM. J KLEIN. 



Tin-ton's Linnaeus, vol. i, p. 264. 

 VOL. II. D 



