WEAVER BIRDS. 339 
of them are huge, heavy, and massive, clustered together in vast multitudes, 
and bearing down the branches with their weight. Others are light, delicate 
and airy, woven so thinly as to permit the breeze to pass through their 
net-like interior, and dangling daintily from the extremity of some slender 
twig. Others, again, are so firmly built of flattened reeds and glass blades, 
SOCIABLE WEAVER bikb.—\Liucce us soctus.) 
that they can be detached from their branches and subjected to very rough 
handling without losing their shape, while others are so curiously formed of 
stiff grass-stalks that their interior is studded with sharp points like the skin 
of a hedgehog. 
The true Weaver Birds all inhabit the hotter portions of the Old World, the 
z2 
