154 ON THE CLASSIFICATION OF BIRDS. 
to the same station, and then proceed to swallow it 
Every one knows that these are the habits of the European 
kingfisher (Alcedo ispida) and travellers affirm that the 
kinghunters (Halcyon) pursue the same method in the ~ 
forests of the Old World. But it has unfortunately 
happened that systematic naturalists, totally unacquainted 
with the natural habits of the other genera (nearly all 
of which are confined to Tropical America), have fancied 
they were climbing birds, and have consequently placed 
them in other orders, whose organisation and economy — 
are widely different. Thus the jacamars, in the Réegne 
Animal, are placed after the hornbills, and the puff- 
birds (Tamatia) are associated with the cuckows. These 
unnatural combinations are the inevitable result of laying 
down those arbitrary rules of classification which are 
not founded on natural economy. 
(174.) The manners of the puff-birds, forming the 
genus Tamatia, have been already described.* They sit 
for hours together on a dead or withered branch, from 
which they dart upon ‘such insects as come sufficiently 
near. The hermit birds (Monassa Vieil.) do the same, 
and frequently rise up perpendicularly in the air, make 
a swoop, and return again to their former station. Similar 
“manners also, belong to the jacamars, although their 
flight isweaker. They generally sit on low, naked branches 
in the forest paths, from whence they dart upon butter- 
flies, spearing them with their long bill: their haunts, 
indeed, may frequently be known by the ground being 
strewed with the beautiful wings of their victims, the 
body of which they alone devour. Now, in all the groups 
of this family here noticed, the bill is invariably com- — 
pressed on its sides, and generally of considerable length ; 
but in the Galbula grandis we first discover a change 
from this structure, and we see a bill considerably broad — 
and depressed, —that character, in short, which is in 
unison with the next family. 4 
( 175.) The Trogonide, or trogons, in one sense, are } 
such an isolated group, that naturalists have been a 
* Zool, Illust. i, pl. 99. 
