276 PROPERTIES OF CLIMBING FEET. 



alone we may come at the true knowledge. But to 

 return to the scandent feet. 



The foot of the parrot is a foot which climbs by 

 clutching — a "tying" foot, as one would say — and 

 not one which holds on by a combination of '• counter- 

 strains," like that of the woodpecker ; and it is so, in 

 order that the owner may find its food in situations 

 where a woodpecker, or, indeed, any bird differently 

 organised to a parrot, could not subsist. The pasture 

 of the parrot is among the sprays or smaller twigs of 

 large spreading trees, and not exactly at the extremi- 

 ties of them, because the fruit which is fit for the 

 parrot's eating is rather farther in, there being a new 

 shoot beyond the fruit before it is ripe, in most fruit 

 trees, and a new shoot with green fruit, and often 

 another with blossoms beyond it, in many of the fruit 

 trees in parrots' countries. Besides, many of those 

 trees bear their fruit at the axillas of the twigs or 

 leaves ; and as the same point of a vegetable never 

 blooms or fruits twice (so that the most perennial 

 trees in duration are really annuals in their most 

 important functions), the successive fruits or flowers 

 are, even in these, without the place where the 

 parrot feeds. Some of the allied genera alight on the 

 tops of the trees, but these are the long-tailed ones, 

 which are better winged, more in the habit of flying, 

 and less expert climbers than the true parrots ; and 

 even they do not penetrate so far into the sprays as 

 where the parrot feeds, and they feed upon fruits of 

 a different character — fruit of which the pips, not the 

 pulp, is eaten. 



Now, anyone who examines a tree, when so cleared 

 of leaves as that the twigs can be seen, must perceive, 

 that at about the situation of the previous year's shoots, 

 the twigs, even when leafless, are so tangled, that no 



