The visitor will arrive first before the three cases (74-76) devoted to the Parrots, Cockatoos, and Macaws.  The gaudy colours which they display, and their well-known habits and powers, always ensure them a large circle of spectators.  Here the visitor should notice the red-crowned parrot, and ground parrot of Australia; the South American yellow-headed, and hawk-headed parrots; the horned parrot from New Caledonia and the racket-tailed parrot of the Philippines.  Among the Macaws are the hyacinthine macaw of South America, and the blue and yellow varieties.  Among the Cockatoos, the visitor should notice the great white cockatoo from the Indian Archipelago; and here also are the Alexandrine parroquet and the Papuan lory.  The Toucans, which inhabit the deep recesses of tropical American forests, here occupy the next case (77).  They are recognised as a branch of the great corvine family.  Their enormous beaks are peculiarly adapted for searching in quest of eggs about the crevices of trees.  The varieties here, include the Janeiro toucan, and the yellow-breasted toucan.  The three next cases contain the many varieties of the Woodpecker.  Woodpeckers are represented by naturalists as crows with a structure adapted to “an insect-eating life amidst growing timber.”  They are to be found in all quarters of the globe, searching out, with their long beaks, the minute life that gathers in the interstices of trees.  The first case of the series, contains the South American and African barbets, and the groove-billed barbican; the minute woodpecker, the North American three-toed and white-billed woodpecker, and the spotted woodpecker common in Europe.  In the second case are the larger varieties of the woodpecker, including the well-known great black woodpecker of Europe; the North American red-headed woodpecker, and the South American yellow-crested variety; the Carolina woodpecker; and the Cayenne woodpecker.  The third case contains the African and American ground woodpeckers; and the Wrynecks of Africa, Europe, and India.  The chief food of the wrynecks consists of ants, which they pick up with their delicately tapered tongues.

The three last cases devoted to perching birds, are occupied by the varieties of the Cuckoo family.  In this country, the notes of the cuckoo are hailed as the announcement of the dawning summer; and the solitary and peculiar habits of the bird, but particularly its custom of placing its eggs in the nests of larks, finches, sparrows, &c., and so getting alien birds to bring up its young, have always made it an object of particular curiosity to people generally.  This latter custom has been explained, by a high authority, thus:—­“The fact is, that the cuckoo is obliged by its constitutional character to stay an unusually short time in the northern regions where it produces its young.  In our country its normal stay is only from the middle of April to the beginning of July.  Belated in its approach to the nursing