76 PRETTY TOLL, 



have not highly developed and serviceable tactile organs 

 will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchy of 

 nature. Now, how does this bear upon the family of 

 parrots? Well, in the first place, everybody who has 

 ever kept a cockatoo or a macaw in domestic slavery 

 is well aware that in no other birds do the claws so 

 closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in 

 outer form or appearance, but in opposability of the 

 thumbs and in perfection of grasping power. The toes 

 on each foot are arranged in opposite pairs — two turning 

 in front and two backward, which gives all parrots their 

 peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch 

 of a tree with one foot only, while they extend the other 

 to grasp a fruit or to clutch at any object they desire to 

 take possession of. True, this peculiarity isn't entirely 

 confined to the parrots alone, as such. They share the 

 division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers with 

 a wnole large group of allied birds, called, in the 

 charmingly concise and poetical language of technical 

 ornithology, the Scansorial Picarians, and more generally, 

 known to the unlearned herd (meaning you and me) by 

 their several names of woodpeckers, cuckoos, toucans, 

 and plantain-eaters. All the members of this great 

 group, of which the parrots proper are only the most 

 advanced and developed family, possess the same arrange- 

 ment of the digits into front-toes and back-toes. But in 

 none is the arrangement so perfect as in the parrots, and 

 in none is the power of grasping an object all round so 

 completely developed and so pregnant in moral and 

 intellectual consequences. 



All the Scansorial Picarians, however (if the reader 



