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They use their crooked beaks to help them in climbing from branch to branch; and being thus provided alike with wings, legs, hands, fingers, bill and tongue, they are in fact the most truly arboreal of all known animals, and present in the fullest and highest degree all the peculiar features of the tree-haunting existence. Nor is that all.
They have opposable thumbs, which make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, intelligent, tree-haunting marsupial spider-monkeys.
But in the succeeding age they seem to disappear from the eastern continent, though in the western, thanks to their hand-like feet, opposable thumb, and tree-haunting life, they still drag out a precarious existence in many forms from Virginia to Chili, and from Brazil to California.
For example, frogs and toads develop from tadpoles, which in all essentials are true gill-breathing fish. It is, therefore, obvious that they cannot lay their eggs on dry land, where the tadpoles would be unable to find anything to breathe; so that even the driest and most tree-haunting toads must needs repair to the water once a year to deposit their spawn in its native surroundings.
I once indulged in a correspondence about it with a well-known psychologist, and would like to think, even now, that this dream is a reminiscence of leaping habits in our tree-haunting days; a ghost of the dim past, therefore, which revisits us at night when recent adjustments are cast aside and man takes on the credulity and savagery of his remotest forefathers; a ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences.
It is therefore probable that with tree-haunting birds, strongly-pronounced colours have been acquired through sexual selection, but that a green tint has been acquired oftener than any other, from the additional advantage of protection. In regard to birds which live on the ground, every one admits that they are coloured so as to imitate the surrounding surface.
Barbets are tree-haunting birds characterised by massive bills. They have loud calls of two or three notes, which they repeat with much persistence. They nestle in trees, themselves excavating the nest cavity. The entrance to the nest is invariably marked by a neat round hole, a little larger than a rupee, in the trunk or a branch of a tree. The coppersmith is the most familiar member of the clan.
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