“We have whole tribes of helpers that devote themselves to the patient search for insect eggs in the cracks of tree bark and in piles of dead leaves, for larvæ between the scales of buds and in the worm-holes in wood, and for insects lurking in narrow crevices where they hide from their pursuers. These invaluable assistants of ours embrace the magpies, nuthatches, wrynecks, climbers, tomtits, wrens, kinglets, and many others. In the kind of hunting here referred to the bird is not obliged to chase the game, to vie with it in swiftness; it is enough to know how to find it in its hiding-place. For this a sharp eye and a slender beak are necessary; wings are only of secondary importance. “But now we come to other species of birds that hunt in the air, chase their game on the wing, pursuing gnats and flies and butterflies, moths and mosquitoes and beetles. They require a short beak, but one that opens very wide and is pretty sure to catch insects as they fly—a beak, in fine, that may be depended on to work almost of itself and without an instant’s pause in the bird’s flight; a beak that, above all, is so sticky inside that as soon as an insect’s wing grazes this viscous lining it is caught fast in the glue-like substance. The beak of the bat, that other hunter of insects on the wing, the bat’s beak, I say, opening from ear to ear, may serve as a model in respect to the width of its opening. But above all else the hunter must have swift wings that never tire, that can fly as fast as the prey which is trying so hard to escape, that can follow the bewildering zigzags of a moth manœuvering to save its life. A cleft beak that opens wide and wings that are strong and tireless—such must be the equipment of the bird that pursues its prey in the open air. “Chief among these hunters is the swallow, which may be called the daylight bat, as the bat is the twilight swallow. Both chase flying insects, following them in their endless dodgings and doublings and snapping them up with yawning beak, then passing on without an instant’s delay to the pursuit of others. But how much more pleasing in appearance, how much swifter in flight is the swallow than that hunter, the sad-looking bat! While we may compare their work and their way of hunting, we cannot compare them in anything else. Buffon quotes Guéneau de Montbéliard as saying: