Captimtilgus europce\is, or Fern Owl. 



31 



naturalists have, perhaps too lazily, adopted ; and, seemingly 

 without any further investigation, as if the subject were already 

 exhausted, have so fully 

 contented themselves 

 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 peculiar haunts and habits of the bird must not, however, 

 be forgotten, 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, veri/ 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 hind toe, but which really is not so, 

 being situated laterally, 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 longways of a branch, and with his head 

 lowermost, as I 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 hind 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, probably, conceived it necessary to exer- 

 cise, what they considered, 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 horse, as the elephant moves both feet on the same sid^ 

 at once. ( See his Journal, 4to edition, p. 29., and plate, 



