﻿EXTERNAL ANATOMY. WING FEATHERS. 93 



the air, flying steadily and surely to its distant retreat, 

 or wending its way from the banks of the Nile to the 

 pestilential swamps of Sicily.* Besides these peculiarities 

 in the wing of the heron, there is another, which it 

 possesses in common with the bee-eaters 

 and some of the swallows ; for although 

 the ends of the quills are very obtuse, 

 as if cut off obliquely, they are notched 

 or sinuated in the middle of the tip 

 (fig. 46.), a sure indication, in all birds 

 where this emargination is found, of 

 very perfect mode of flight, whatever 

 that mode may be. Nor is this sort 

 of wing strictly confined to examples 

 in the grallatorial order; for we find it in the green 

 chatterers of India (Calyptomina), in the cock of 

 the rock (Rupicola), and in the genus Promerops. In 

 the first of these the secondary quills are remarkably 

 broad and deeply notched, and the tertials of the latter 

 are divided into those long filaments which form such 

 an elegant ornament to the egrets, and to the sacred 

 ibis. This form of wing is perhaps at its minimum in 

 some of the African Cinnyridce, or sun-birds, where the 

 secondaries are little shorter, but much broader, than the 

 primaries ; but the tertials, instead of being lengthened, 

 as in the Ardeadce, are of the same length as the quills 

 which precede them. 



(85.) Lastly, we come to abortive wings, or such 

 as are incapable of being used as instruments of flight. 

 These are of two kinds ; the first belong to land birds 

 of the ostrich family, the second to the swimming order, 

 and chiefly to the penguins, grebes, and awks. The 

 difficulty of examining with critical accuracy such large 

 birds as the Struthionidce, which are generally placed 

 in glazed cases in our museums, will oblige us to confine 

 the short notice we shall here take of their wings to 



* The lakes of Leontini are the resort of numberless migratory aquatic 

 birds j but the miasma proved the death of many of the best sportsmen in 

 the' Mediterranean army, between 1806 and 1814. 



