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Notices of New Books. 



One glimpse at the tongue and I have done. In humming birds 

 this organ assumes an extraordinary form and character, which I regret 

 to say 1 have never had the opportunity of examining, but which from 

 the description would appear to differ from that of all other birds. It 

 is long, slender and extensile, or capable of protrusion far beyond the 

 beak ; but its distinguishing character is that nearly throughout its 

 length it is bitubular, the tubes uniting almost in the throat, where 

 the tongue is continued in the excessively-developed forks of the 

 hyoid bones, and united to muscles which pass under the throat, and 

 then returning over the head are attached to the fore part of the skull, 

 not far from the base of the upper mandible. This wondrous struc- 

 ture is partially observable in the woodpeckers, the extensile character 

 and the apparatus for protrusion and retractation being much the same ; 

 but the tongue of the woodpecker is not tubular, the extremity being 

 converted into a kind of harpoon, with which the insect prey of the 

 bird is transfixed. The goatsuckers and swifts have small and short 

 tongues, quite incapable of protrusion ; and this brevity of tongue may 

 be said to culminate in the kingfisher, where it is reduced to an insig- 

 nificant triangular process lying at the base of the lower mandible. 

 The tongue of the sun-bird is long and slender, but I find no sufficient 

 authority for stating that it is either extensile or tubular, and therefore 

 this organ affords me no corroborative evidence of the affinity I have 

 desired to establish between the humming birds and the sun-birds. 



And now it is time that I bring this protracted notice to a close. 

 It has extended to a far greater length than I intended, and its very 

 length has for several months delayed its appearance ; but worse than 

 this, and more to be lamented, the subject is yet incomplete ; the nests of 

 humming birds remain untouched and unexamined, and these alone 

 might fill a number of the 6 Zoologist/ I might explain from personal 

 observation, not in " Antarctic France " but in smoky London, how 

 these beautiful little structures are sometimes glued to the surface of a 

 palm leaf, sometimes stuck in the fork of a branch, sometimes sus- 

 pended by a rope of straw, swinging lightly and in safety amid the 

 uproar of equatorial storms. I might tell how that they always contain 

 two snow-white eggs reposing side by side, and looking like twin sugar- 

 plums ; but I forbear : I leave the subject with no promise, indeed 

 with no intention, of returning to it. I can do nothing further than 

 refer my readers to the works of that indefatigable and most accom- 

 plished naturalist, who has made the subject his own, and whilst 

 shedding a flood of light on the history of the humming bird has 

 earned for himself a name that will not die. Of such a naturalist as 



