Caprimileus europe us, or Fern Owl. Bl 
naturalists have, perhaps too lazily, adopted ; and, seemingly 
without any further investigation, as if the subject were already 
exhausted, have so fully 
contented themselv 
with its acceptation, that 
they have not even at- 
tempted to perfect the 
suppositive part of his 
narration. It is in favour 
of Mr. Selby I would 
make the exemplary ex- 
ception adverted to; for, 
as far as I know, he was 
the first to announce 
that ‘ the bristles lining 
the edge of the upper mandible are capable of diverging or 
contracting , by means of muscles attached to their roots.’ 
The peeuliar haunts and habits of the bird must not, however, 
be for gotten, as they are such as render fair opportunities of 
close observation very infrequent. 
The points to which I am, at present, desirous of drawing 
attention, are the length of the tarsus, the structure of the 
foot, and the use of the middle claw —the serrated one. 
The tarsus is short, comparatively, very short; in this cir- 
cumstance closely resembling, but shorter than, the cuckoo’s. 
The toes are four in number ; ; three anterior, and one usu- 
ally denominated the Aznd toe, but which really is not so, 
being situated later cally, or as a man’s thumb. It is very well 
known that the bird is not, strictly speaking, a percher ; that 
he never sits across a twig; but whenever observed in a tree 
is always seen resting long ways of a branch, and with his head 
lowermost, as 1 conceive, the better to destroy his insect prey, 
while on the alert. In Mr. Bewick’s otherwise accurate 
figure, the bird is shown in a perching attitude, and thus at 
variance with his own description ; he has also drawn the foot 
with a find toe, rather than a lateral one: and precisely the 
same things may be said of the figure and description in 
Graves’s Ornithology; but the foot of his bird is very ill repre- 
sented. The artists, pr obably, conceived it necessary to exer- 
cise, what they condidirad! in these cases, a harmless liberty 
of sacrificing truth to effect; just as the elephant is always 
drawn, and even by Bishop Heber himself, who was yet aware 
of the fact, that the animal’s motion is very different from that 
of the Worse: as the elephant moves both feet on the same side 
at once. (See his Journal, 4to edition, p. 29., and plate, 
