a decided personal nose for the saltpetre).
If crows could perceive that perfume it
would attract them, instead of driving
them away. Crows and vultures are carrion
birds, who love, above all things, the treat of
a battle.

Once, when the sons of the last king of
France had ordered the make-believe of a
nice little war to be got up in the environs of
Fontainebleau for the gratification of the
burgesses of Paris,—a race whose eyes are
always on the look-out for childish spectacles
wherein quiet people pretend that they are
on the point of killing other quiet people,—an
old crow of the neighbourhood, who had gone
through the campaign of eighteen hundred
and twelve, fancied he recognised in the
manoeuvres of the army of parade, a repetition
of the murderous dramas which had
supplied him, in the good old time, with
frequent and delicious banquets. He
informed his comrades all around, what a lucky
chance was in store for them: expressly
advising them to get their beaks and claws
sharpened, on their way to the rendezvous.
A whole flock of body-pickers assembled, and
hovered in thick groups over the two camps,
exciting them by their vociferations to set
to, in right good earnest. If but little blood
were shed, it was not through any fault of
the crows; and nothing could equal their
spite and rage when they found that the
demonstration was only a joke.

We have here only room briefly to state
that M. Toussenel, for reasons which he ably
states, classifies birds according to the form
of the foot. Every bird, from the penguin of
the Antarctic pole, to the gerfalcon of the
North Cape, has the foot either flat or
curved. The whole kingdom of birds is thus
divisible into Flat-foots and Curve-foots.
The first three orders of the former class, are,
the Oar-foots, the Stilters, and the Vélocipèdes,
or Runners. Further general details
are now impossible; we can only give a
sample of the Runners.

Praise be to Heaven for creating the velocipede,
the delight alike of the eye and the
palate—the glory and ornament of fields,
forests, and feasts —the nourisher of rich and
poor! No other race contributes in the same
proportion to man's two composite pleasures
of sporting and eating. The world with no
other living creatures to inhabit it than men,
women, and velocipedes, might still manage t
o get on tolerably.

The velocipedes come immediately after
the stilters, in the order of creation. They
were the first inhabitants of the earliest
emerging continents; for, they are  herbivorous
and graminivorous creatures, and grass is
the initial manifestation of the vital forces of
the earth. Their character of primogeniture
is, moreover, indelibly stamped upon all their
features, in their rudimental structure, and
their small number of toes. The order opens
with the ostrich (the ostrich is a bird-
quadruped, as the penguin is a bird-fish); it cannot
fly, for want of wings, and has only two
toes on each foot. If the monodactyl, or one-
toed bird, existed, it would certainly belong
to this order. All the runners of Europe
have wings and can fly. The most
unfinished series we possess, is that of the
winged tridactyls. The bustard is the one
which comes nearest to the ostrich.
Nevertheless, as every individual in the order has
its frame modelled, more or less, after that of
the ostrich, it is important to refer to this
original and primitive pattern, and to
compare its organization with that of the
humming-birds: in order clearly to comprehend
the character and the providential destiny of
the creatures we are considering.

The humming-bird, and all the swift-sailers,
have the thoracic cavity, or chest,
outrageously developed, with the ridge of the
breast- bone projecting, like the keel of a
cutter. But, in virtue of the natural law of
equilibrium, this excessive development can
only take place at the expense of some other
part of the body. In the humming-bird, the
atrophied and deficient portion is the region
of the insertion of the lower members. All
is sacrificed to lightness and utility. The
chest is fashioned like the blade of a knife.
In short, the swift sailer, when its feathers
are plucked, has a great resemblance to its
own skeleton: an idea, which invincibly
repulses all thoughts of savoury roast-meat.

But let us demolish, piece by piece, the
frame of the bird of prey, or the humming-
bird. Let us put the complete in the place
of the incomplete, and substitute the empty
for the full. Let us take, in one word, the
very reverse of all these anatomical arrangements,
and we shall have the exact pattern
of the runner. There do not, perhaps, exist
in all nature two creatures belonging to the
same family, which bear such slight marks
of relationship, as the humming-bird and the
ostrich. In vain would the latter deny the
fact that it partakes more of the camel than
of the biped; for, in proof of the fact, it
carries on its back, the children and the
kings of Egypt. An ostrich is a vice-versa
humming-bird. Here flight, there running,
is the only means of locomotion. In the
ostrich the breast-bone, instead of projecting,
is flattened down to ridiculous dimensions.
It is a bony plate in the form of a shield,
which acts as a prow instead of a keel. The
thighs and legs assume the bulky dimensions
of the same parts in herbivorous quadrupeds.
All of which means, that Nature, who, in the
swift sailers, has favoured the development  of
uneatable parts at the expense of those which
are articles of food, has completely changed
her style of architecture in the velocipedes:
neglecting the parts which are never
eaten, in order to develope, in luxurious
fashion, those parts which supply us with
dainty dishes.

Now, wherefore this contrast of comparative