INTRODUCTION. 
151 
more similarity in passing from blossom to blossom* 
to the activity of some of our small warblers, rapidly 
examining the flowers of one plant and immediately 
passing off to another, uttering, during the while, a 
shrill and impatient call. Neither do the species per- 
form extensive migrations, at least, where a con- 
tinued flight has to be maintained. In the Old 
World the change of station is chiefly from the town 
and coast districts to the more exalted regions, where 
it is possible a succession of food may be acquired ; 
or if the range is more extonsive, it is performed 
over tracts, or coast-wise, where resting-places may 
be found during its continuance. In both groups 
the bill and the tongue are inserted into the tubes, 
and withdraw from them the honey and the small 
insects which are attracted by it. In both the me- 
chanism of the tongue is in different manners 
adapted for this mode of deriving nourishment, and 
in both are the members of the family extremely 
numerous, social in their habits, and probably in- 
tended, in their respective countries, as one of the 
means by which the sexes of many plants are intro- 
duced to each other. Thus it is that we see design 
in every part of the plan of Nature, and even its 
frailest creatures dressed in a garb of splendour, 
and, agreeable to all external senses, also made the 
instruments, in a manner most simple, at the same 
time essential to their own existence, of carrying on 
tracted from flowers, and partly on minute insects, flies, eica- 
flarica 1 , &c. Occasionally I have seen it snap at an insect in 
the air.” Jerdon’s Cat., Madras Joum., 1839, el seq. 
