318 STEL-THIONID-E. 



much thicker and stronger than in flying birds. There 

 is not, upon this bony structure, any place where 

 muscles capable of giving motion to a wing could be 

 inserted. The strong articulation by the coracoids 

 and the ribs, and the length of the scapulars which 

 suspend the former, enable this form of bone, how- 

 ever, to give the most efficient support to the body, 

 as a basket in which the thoracic viscera are carried ; 

 and its convex form renders it a most efficient breast- 

 plate against any external injury to which the bird 

 may be exposed. 



Those who consider flight as the essential charac- 

 teristic of birds, sometimes regard this structure as an 

 imperfect one ; but when we examine it with regard 

 to the offices wliich it has to perform, we find the 

 same perfection of adaptation in it as in that form 

 which afl'ords a fulcrum to the most active wing, and 

 insertion to the most powerful muscles. The species 

 of land birds incapable of flight are so few, and their 

 natural pastures on the earth so peculiar and so 

 limited, that we can with difficulty so connect them 

 with the rest of nature as to understand the part 

 which they act in the general economy. But though 

 they are thus, in a great measure, a sealed book to us, 

 we find that, in as far as we can study them with 

 relation to their haunts, they aftbrd as irresistible evi- 

 dence of that perfect knowledge of all the circum- 

 stances, at the original formation of the creature, 

 which inscribes the name of God upon all that God 

 has made, in characters so plain that he who runs may 

 read, as any other race that can be named. The 

 ostrich on the African karoo, the crested cassouary in 

 India, the hea among the tall herbage of the American 

 pampas, the emu on the "hummocky" plains of Austra- 

 lia, and (as we have reason to suppose) the apteryx 



