154 HONEY-EATER. 



Tongue, more or less, extensile, bristly, fringed, or divided at 

 the end into thready portions. 



Legs made for walking. 



I have elsewhere remarked the difficulties which have occurred 

 in arranging birds under the Creeper Genus, arising from the 

 difference of the organs given them for collecting their food, and 

 particularly such as, with a bill in common with others, proper to 

 feed on insects, have, instead of a short, fleshy, and pointed tongue, 

 one differently formed, for the purpose of collecting honey from 

 flowers; and which, although it may not be the only, yet is supposed 

 to be their principal food. In the greater part of these birds the 

 tongue is not only ciliated, or bristly at the end, but in some of them 

 divided into two, three, or four portions, and even these portions are 

 bristly, or more or less hairy ; in many, too, this organ is capable of 

 great elongation, whenever the bird may have occasion to protrude 

 it beyond the end of the bill. 



Birds, thus furnished, are for the most part natives of New- 

 Holland, or other Isles distant from the Continent; and certainly, 

 from these distinctive characters, claim to be placed in a new Genus. 

 At first, the knowledge of many here recorded was imperfect, from 

 being acquainted with them only by means of drawings, in which, 

 if the bill was represented as shut, and no notice being taken of the 

 tongue, the describer could not do otherwise than place them in the 

 Genus to which each bore most resemblance : and this will account 

 for several having been formerly ranked with the Bee-Eaters ; others 

 with the Thrushes, and again with the Flycatchers ; but the point, 

 in respect to many of them, has of late been more fully ascertained, 

 from being enabled to view a great number of real specimens, and 

 to judge, in course, of the parts in question, by which we have been 

 determined in our opinion of forming such into a separate Genus. 



It is now many years since Mr. Anderson, in his manuscript 

 observations of the birds of New-Holland, placed as many as he 



