116 CONIROSTRES. 



finding that it includes the lark, the raven, and the 

 bird of paradise, three species which are unlike each 

 other in appearance, character, haunt, and manners. 

 The name is not indeed accurately descriptive of the 

 bill, as it appears generally in birds of the division. 

 No doubt the bill is, generally speaking, enlarged at 

 the base, and tapering toward the tip, straight, or free 

 from any notch in the tomia, more firm in its general 

 texture, and especially in its cutting edges, than the 

 notched bills of the first division ; but it is conical 

 only in a few genera, and most conspicuously so in 

 the grosbeaks and finches. In other genera it is of 

 a great variety of shapes, sometimes angular, some- 

 times arched in the culmen, sometimes coulter- 

 shaped, and, in fact, of so many ditfeient forms, that it 

 cannot with propriety be described by any one general 

 epithet, for the more accurately which that epithet 

 were descriptive of the bill of one genus, it would be 

 the less descriptive of that of others. 



-^ ^^ 



Bullfinch. 



There is, however, a shadowy sort of general 

 resemblance in texture and function among those 

 bills, though it is not very easy to find an appropriate 

 name for it. The texture, at least at the cutting 

 edges, is always firm ; these, in general, close for the 

 whole of their length, and thus they are capable of 



