into the order of Perching-Birds at all. However, we are not concerned with the merits of this or that system of classification. It is enough to remember that in Jerdon's book and Barnes and all Mr. A. O. Hume's publications, certain of the most striking and attractive of our birds, namely, the Sunbirds, or Honey-suckers, and the Hoopoe, will be found in this Tribe.
Sunbirds are not the same as Humming-birds. The Humming-bird, "Half bird, half fly, the fairy king of flowers," belongs to the peculiar glories of the New World. But its place in the old is taken by the Sunbird, and there are so many outward resemblances between them that it was natural at first to regard them as very nearly allied. Their anatomy, however, shows that they are radically different, and we must conclude that their outward likeness depends upon the fact that they are called upon to fill a similar place in the economy of things. We are all moulded by the conditions of our life. Men of the same trade in different countries will show similar traits of character, or even a similarity of feature, in spite of all national divergences. The Koli women of this coast are distinguished from the women of all other castes by a volubility of vituperative eloquence which betrays at once that they are "fish-wives," and the barber is the town gossip here as in Europe. So the warm-blooded whale, living always in water, has turned its limbs into fins and assumed the mask of a cold-blooded fish, while the Australian Platypus has its snout transformed into a bill like a duck, for it lives the life of a duck. Examples of this kind are so common in nature that we need not be surprised to find Sunbirds exhibiting a likeness to Humming-birds in those character-
