DISTRIBUTION OF ORGANISMS. 185 



mage belong to the sea, but extend into rivers. In their 

 wide diffusion over the earth, in their habit of darting upon 

 fish, and in their voice, which, in an Australian species, is a 

 laugh, they show their title to the place assigned to them. 

 To them we affiliate the Bee-eaters (Meropida), extensively 

 diffused in the old world, and the Rollers. These birds are 

 all fissirostral, a change of beak having taken place to fit 

 them for catching the insects on which they feed. 



We now come to the well known, universally diffused 

 Crows, the ancestors of by far the greater portion of the 

 present stirps. Intelligent, wary, social, omnivorous, though 

 some tend more to flesh-eating than others, this family is 

 everywhere well marked; everywhere are they an object of 

 marvel and curious study to our species, to whom it almost 

 appears as if their voices were a kind of speech. In the 

 genealogy of animals, their place is extremely important, for 

 to scarcely any has so vast and various a progeny been 

 given. It clearly appears that various crows, the Raven, 

 Rook, Jay, Pie, &c., are the heads of so many distinct 

 families, which have assumed various sub- characters in 

 different regions of the globe, according as they were 

 affected by external conditions ; " a mighty maze, but not 

 without a plan." 



Taking the predaceous corvidae first they start in the 

 Raven of the old world, and misnamed Black Vulture of 

 America ; the largest of all the species ; animals keen- 

 scented, cautious, yet fierce, and which do not scruple even to 

 attack some of the larger mammalia. In our continent, we 

 see the raven and carrion crow followed by the hooded crow, 

 which, being only a reduced image of its predecessor, will 

 without much difficulty pair with it, and produce a prolific 

 offspring. 



The crows are classed by naturalists as Conirostres ; that 

 is, having a conical beak. The beak is, nevertheless, con- 

 siderably curved in the predaceous species, so as to approach 

 the hooked form : in the American carrion crow it is as de- 

 cidedly hooked as that of any raptorial bird. This should 



