From the scansorial or climbing order it takes the faculty of picking the ground, and discovering its food when hidden from the eye, while the parrot family gives it the taste for vegetable food, and furnishes it with great cunning, sagacity, and powers of imitation, even to counterfeiting the human voice. Next come the order of waders, who impart their quota to the perfection of the crow by giving it great powers of flight, and perfect facility in walking, such being among the chief attributes of the suctorial order. Lastly, the aquatic birds contribute their portion, by giving this terrestrial bird the power of feeding not only on fish, which are their peculiar food, but actually of occasionally catching it. {270} In this wonderful manner do we find the crow partially invested with the united properties of all other birds, while in its own order, that of the incessores or perchers, it stands the pre-eminent type. We cannot also fail to regard it as a remarkable proof of the superior organization and character of the corvidæ, that they are adapted for all climates, and accordingly found all over the world. Mr. Swainson’s description of the zoological status of the crow, written without the least design of throwing any light upon that of man, evidently does so in a remarkable degree. It prepares us to expect in the place among the mammalia, corresponding to that of the corvidæ in the aves, a being or set of beings possessing a remarkable concentration of qualities from all the other groups of their order, but in general character as far above the corvidæ as a typical group is above an aberrant one, the mammalia above the aves. Can any of the simiadæ pretend to such a place, narrowly and imperfectly endowed as these creatures are—a mean reflection apparently of something higher? Assuredly not, and in this consideration alone Mr. Swainson’s arrangement must fall to the ground. To fill worthily so lofty a station in the animated families man alone is competent. In him only is to be found that concentration of qualities from all the other groups of his order which has been described as marking the corvidæ. That grasping power, which has been selected as the leading physical quality of his order, is nowhere so beautifully or so powerfully developed as in his hand. The intelligence and teachableness of the simiadæ rise to a climax in his pre-eminent mental nature. His sub-analogy to the feræ is marked by his canine teeth, and the universality of his rapacity, for where is the department of animated nature which he does not without scruple sacrifice to his convenience? With sanguinary, he has also gentle and domesticable dispositions, thus reflecting the characters of the ungulata, (the rasorial type of the class,) to which we perhaps see a further analogy in the use which he makes of the surface of the earth as a source of food. To the aquatic type his love of maritime adventure very readily