has acquired an unusual amount of general intelligence. And further, in the keen competition for life, he has been forced to develop an amount of cunning which leaves his Australian poor relations far behind in the Middle Ages of psychological evolution. At the risk of appearing to forsake my ostensible subject altogether, I must pause for a moment to answer a very obvious objection to my argument. How about the dog and the horse? They have no prehensile organ, and yet they are admitted to be the most intelligent of all quadrupeds. The cleverness of the horse and the dog, however, is acquired, not original. It has arisen in the course of long and hereditary association with man, the cleverest and most serviceable individuals having been deliberately selected from generation to generation as dams and sires to breed from. We cannot fairly compare these artificial human products with wild races whose intelligence is entirely self-evolved. In addition, the horse has, to a slight extent, a prehensile organ in his mobile and sensitive lip, which he uses like an undeveloped or rudimentary proboscis with which he can feel things all over. We may conclude, I believe, that touch is “the mother-tongue of the senses;” and that in proportion as animals have or have not highly developed and serviceable tactile organs will they rank high or low in the intellectual hierarchy of nature. It may well be asked how all this concerns the family of parrots. In the first place, anybody who has ever kept a parrot or a macaw in slavery is well aware that in no other birds do the claws so closely resemble a human or simian hand, not indeed in outer form or appearance, but in apposability of the thumbs and in perfection of grasping power. The toes upon each foot are arranged in opposite pairs—two turning in front and two backward, which gives all parrots their peculiar firmness in clinging on a perch or on the branch of a tree with one foot only, while they extend the other to grasp a fruit or to clutch at any object they desire to possess. This peculiarity, it must be admitted, is not confined to the parrots, for they share the division of the foot into two thumbs and two fingers with a large group of allied birds, called, in the exact language of technical ornithology, the Scansorial Picarians, and more generally known by their several names of cockatoos, toucans and wood-peckers. All the members of this great group, of which the parrots proper are only the most advanced and developed family, possess the same arrangement of the digits into front-toes and back-toes, and in none is the power of grasping an object all round so completely developed and so full of intellectual consequences.