GOLDEN-WINGED WOODPECKER. 
25 
sooth, the whole family of Woodpeckers must look sad, sour, and 
be miserable, to satisfy the caprice of a whimsical philosopher, 
who takes it into his head that they are, and ought to be, so. 
But the count is not the only European who has misrepre- 
sented and traduced this beautiful bird. One has given him 
brown legs,* another a yellow neck;t a third has declared him 
a Cuckoo,!: and in an English translation of Linnaeus’s System 
of Nature, lately published, he is characterized as follows,: 
“transversely striate with black and gray; chin and breast black; 
does not climb trees;”§ which is just as correct as if, in describ- 
ing the human species, we should say — skin striped with black 
and green; cheeks blue; chin orange; never walks on foot, &c. 
The pages of natural history should resemble a faithful mirror, 
in which mankind may recognize the true images of the living 
originals; instead of which we find this department of them, too 
often, like the hazy and rough medium of wretched window 
glass, through whose crooked protuberances every thing ap- 
pears so strangely distorted, that one scarcely knows their most 
intimate neighbours and acquaintance. 
The Golden-winged Woodpecker has the back and wings 
above of a dark umber, transversely marked with equidistant 
streaks of black; upper part of the head an iron gray; cheeks and 
parts surrounding the eyes, a fine cinnamon colour; from the 
lower mandible a strip of black, an inch in length, passes down 
each side of the throat, and a lunated spot, of a vivid blood red, 
covers the hindhead, its two points reaching within half an inch 
of each eye; the sides of the neck, below this, incline to a bluish 
gray; throat and chin a very light cinnamon or fawn colour; 
the breast is ornamented with a broad crescent of deep black; 
the belly and vent white, tinged with yellow, and scattered with 
innumerable round spots of black, every feather having a distinct 
central spot, those on the thighs and vent being heart-shaped 
and largest; the lower or inner side of the wing and tail, shafts 
of all the larger feathers, and indeed of almost every feather, 
* See Encycl. Brit. Art. Piers. f Latham. t Klein. 
§ Turton’s Linnseus, vol. i, p. 264. 
VOL. II. D 
