Parrots are true vegetarians; with a single degraded exception, to which I shall recur hereafter, they do not touch animal food. They live chiefly upon a diet of fruit and seeds, or upon the abundant nectar of rich tropical flowers. And it is mainly for the purpose of getting at their chosen food that they have developed the large and powerful bills which characterize the family. Most of us have probably noticed that many tropical fruit-eaters, like the hornbills and the toucans, are remarkable for the size and strength of their beaks; and the majority of thinking people are well acquainted with the fact that tropical fruits often have thick or hard or bitter rinds, which must be torn off before the monkeys or birds, for whose use they are intended, can get at them and eat them. As monkeys use their fingers in place of knives and forks, so birds use their sharp and powerful bills. No better nut-crackers and fruit-parers could possibly be found. The parrot, in particular, has developed for the purpose his curved and inflated beak—a wonderful weapon, keen as a tailor’s scissors, and moved by powerful muscles on both sides of the face which bring together the cutting edges with extraordinary energy. The way the bird holds a fruit gingerly in one claw, while he strips off the rind dexterously with his under-hung lower mandible, and keeps a sharp look-out meanwhile for a possible intruder, suggests to the observing mind the whole living drama of his native forest. One sees in that vivid world the watchful monkey ever ready to swoop down upon the tempting tail-feathers of his hereditary foe; one sees the parrot ever prepared for his rapid attack, and eager to make him pay with five joints of his tail for his impertinent interference with an unoffending fellow-citizen of the arboreal community. Of course there are parrots and parrots. The great black cockatoo, for example, the largest of the tribe, lives almost exclusively upon the central shoot of palm-trees; an expensive kind of food, for when once this so-called “cabbage” has been eaten the tree dies, so that each black cockatoo must have killed in his time whole groves of cabbage-palms. Other parrots live on fruits and seeds; and quite a number are adapted for flower-haunting and honey-sucking.