or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a
half. Suppressing, with Mr. Cuvier, the order of Picae, we must refer
this extraordinary bird to the _Sparrows_."

56. We can only suppose that it must be, to our popular sparrows, what
the swallow of the cinnamon country is to our subordinate swallow. Do
you recollect the cinnamon swallows of Herodotus, who build their
mud-nests in the faces of the cliffs where Dionusos was brought up, and
where nobody can get near them; and how the cinnamon merchants fetch
them joints of meat, which the unadvised birds, flying up to their
nests with, instead of cinnamon,--nest and all come down together,--the
original of Sindbad's valley-of-diamond story?

57. Well, Humboldt is reduced, by necessities of recent classification,
to call a bird three feet and a half across the wings, a sparrow. I
have no right to laugh at him, for I am just going, myself, to call the
cheerfulest and brightest of birds of the air, an owl. All these
architectural and sepulchral habits, these Egyptian manners of the
sand-martin, digging caves in the sand, and border-trooper's habits of
the chimney swallow, living in round towers instead of open air,
belonging to them as connected with the tribe of the falcons through
the owls! and not only so, but with the mammalia through the bats! A
swallow is an emancipated owl, and a glorified bat; but it never
forgets its fellowship with night.

58. Its _ancient_ fellowship, I had nearly written; so natural is it to
think of these similarly-minded creatures, when the feelings that both
show are evidently useless to one of them, as if the inferior had
changed into the higher. The doctrine of development seems at first to
explain all so pleasantly, that the scream of consent with which it has
been accepted by men of science, and the shriller vociferation of the
public's gregarious applause, scarcely permit you the power of
antagonistic reflection. I must justify to-day, in graver tone than
usual, the terms in which I have hitherto spoken,--it may have been
thought with less than the due respect to my audience,--of the popular
theory.

59. Supposing that the octohedrons of galena, of gold, and of oxide of
iron, were endowed with powers of reproduction, and perished at
appointed dates of dissolution or solution, you would without any doubt
have heard it by this time asserted that the octohedric form, which was
common to all, indicated their descent from a common progenito