the Family of Cuculidce. 215 
bidce are respectively placed, it will be found that they mutually 
represent each other ; all being tenui rostral types. 
But after all, it is more than probable that the birds now before 
us are restricted to warm latitudes by the nature of their food, and 
not from any peculiar impatience of cold, arising from the above 
circumstances. The Cuculidce are insectivorous and frugivorous, 
for they live both upon insects and fruits ; the former habit, how- 
ever, is not manifested by those bristles which are usually seen 
at the mouth of insect-eating birds, because the cuckoos only 
devour soft caterpillars ; but the latter is manifested by their 
wide gape, the angle of the mouth being carried far backwards 
towards or even under the eye : this structure enables the jaws, 
or mandibles, to be very widely extended, and is a certain indi- 
cation that such birds feed upon soft fruits, which are swallowed 
whole. From all this it is clear that the cuckoos, independent 
of other considerations, can only exist, permanently or temporarily, 
in warm countries, where insects and fruits abound ; and we accord- 
ingly find that their geographic distribution has been so regulated. 
So faintly is the scausorial structure indicated in these birds, that 
but for their natural habits, joined to the position of their toes, we 
should not suspect they were so intimately connected with the more 
typical groups of the tribe, as they undoubtedly are. They neither 
use their bill for climbing like the parrots, or for making holes in 
trees, like the woodpeckers, neither can they mount the perpendi- 
cular stems, like the Certhiadae or creepers : and yet they decided- 
ly climb, although in a manner peculiar to themselves. Having 
frequently seen different species of the Brizilian cuckoos (forming 
part of the genus Coccyzus) in their native forests, I may safely 
affirm that they climb in all other directions than that of the per- 
pendicular. Their flight is so feeble, from the extreme shortness of 
their wings, that it is evidently performed with difficulty, and it is 
never exercised but to convey them from one tree to another, and 
these nights in the thickly wooded tracts of tropical America are of 
course very short : they alight upon the highest boughs, and imme- 
diately begin to explore the horizontal and slanting ramifications, 
with the greatest assiduity, threading the most tangled mazes, and 
leaving none unexamined. All soft insects inhabiting such situa- 
tions laying in their route become their prey ; and the quantities 
that are thus destroyed must be very great. In passing from one 
bough to another, they simply hop, without using their wings, and 
their motions are so quick that an unpractised observer, even if 
placed immediately beneath the tree, would soon lose sight of the 
bird. The Brazilian hunters give to their cuckoos the general name 
