92 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
referred to are true and well said, but the last words on the 
relationship of the Swifts to the Swallows on one hand, and to the 
Humming-birds and Goatsuckers on the other, have not been 
said yet. 
I have just received a short, but valuable paper on the 
Swifts, by my friend Mr. Frederic A. Lucas, of Washington,* 
and I am, almost impatiently, waiting for Dr. R. W. Shufeldt’s 
paper on these birds and their relations, which I understand is to 
appear in the ‘Journal of the Linnean Society.’t 
For my part, I am always more inclined to observe and study 
facts, than to make inductions from those facts. In the present 
short communication I will try and do both. 
The Swifts lie between two groups of birds that differ in the 
most marvellous manner—the Passeres and the Picarie, or 
Coccygomorphe ; the former are jive times as numerous, as the 
latter are ten times more polymorphic, than the former. Moreover, 
the Passeres, with the Raven as their type, are the highest 
creatures that have arisen from the general mass of the Saurop- 
sida; the Coccygomorphe only take a second place; and not- 
withstanding all their plasticity, their marvellous suppleness, 
taking on as they have done any size and any shape that might 
help them in their struggle for existence, they nevertheless form 
but a small kingdom as compared with the thousands of neat 
and uniform Passeres, birds in which the elements are kindly 
mixed, and in which the large brain makes possible the highest 
ornithic intelligence. 
Why the Swallows should have come to the top, to be members 
of this most highly accomplished, most wonderfully endowed 
order of birds, and why the Swifts should have come short—have 
missed their mark as to avian nobility—no one can say. 
In one respect the Swifts certainly are at the head of the 
whole class, and that in the most distinguishing attribute of the 
class; they are the highest of all flying creatures; not only 
Insects, Pterodactyles, and Bats, but all other “ birds of wing” 
are inferior to them in their distinguishing faculty; they seem 
to me to have been ready to part with everything that they might 

* «The Auk,’ vol. vi. pp. 8—13, figs. 1—3. 
+ The paper referred to is entitled “‘ Studies of the Macrochires, morpho- 
logical and otherwise with the view of pointing out their relationships, and 
defining their several positions in the system.’’—Eb, 
