Birds, says M. Toussencl, a distinguished French Ornithologist, live more in a given time than any other creatures. For, to live, is not only to love; it is also to move, act, and travel. The hours of the swift, which in sixty minutes can reach the distance of eighty leagues, are longer than the hours of the tortoise, because they are better occupied, and comprise a greater number of events. Men of the present day, who can go from America to Europe in little more than a week, live four times as much as men of the last century, who took a month to make the passage. People who arc now fifty years of age have still a longer time before them than Michael Angelo and Voltaire had at the moment when they were laid in the cradle. Independently of birds thui enjoying more of life than all other beings in the same given number of years, time seems to glide over them without leaving a trace of its effects; or rather, time only improves them, reviving their colors and strengthening their voices. Age increases the beauty of birds, while in men it bring! on ugliness.

A bird is a model ship constructed by the hand of God, in which the conditions of swiftness, manageability, and lightness, are absolutely and necessarily the same as in vessels built by the hand of man. There are not in the world two things which resemble each other more strongly, both mechanically and physically speaking, than the carcass and framework of a bird and a Ehip. The breast-bone so exactly resembles a keel, that the English language has retained the name. The wings are the oars, the tail the rudder. That original observer, Huber the Genevese, who has carefully noticed the flight of birds of prey, haa even made use of the metaphor thus suggested to establish a characteristic distinction between rowers and sailers. The rowers are the faleons, who have the first or second wing-feather the longest, and who are able, by means of this powerful oar to dart right into the wind's eye. The mere sailers are the eagles, the vultures, and the buzzards, whose more rounded wings resemble sails. The rowing bird is to the sailing bird what the steamer that laughs at adverse winds is to the schooner, which can not advance against them.

The bones of highflyers, as well as their feathers, are tubes filled with air, communicating with a pulmonary reservoir of prodigious capacity. This reservoir is also closely connected with the air-cells which lie between the interior muscles, and which are so many swimming-bladders by aid of which the bird is able to inflate its volume, and diminish its specific gravity in proportion. In birds that are laden with a heavy burden of head, Nature has interposed so decided a gap between skin and flesh, that there results an almost complete detachment of the skin. Consequently, they can be stripped of their coating just as easily as a rabbit can. In man, and other mammifers, the blood, in the act of breathing, advances ready to meet the air; in birds, air enters to find the blood, and comes in contact with it, every where Hence an ubiquity of respiration and a rapidity of hamatosis, which explains the untirnbility of the wings of birds. The muscles do not get fatigued, because they receive new vigor every second from the influence of the ever-revivified blood. A stag or a hare drops at last, when hunted, because its lungs, rather than its legs, ore tired.

Between the different members of a bird's body there exists a sort of equilibrium and balance, which prevents any one organ from obtaining undue development without another losing in the same proportion Thus, exaggerated length of wing generally coincides with very small feet and legs. Examples: the frigate-bird, the swift, and the humming-bird. Feathered feet and legs are mostly short, as in pigeons, bantams, ptarmigan, and grouse. Nature always contrives to economize out of one part of a bird's body the material which she has too lavishly expended upon another. Good walkers are bad flyers, and good flyers are bad walkers. First-rate runners and divers are deprived of the power of rising in the air. Half-blind individuals, like owls, are astonishingly quick of hearing. Creatures clad in plain costume are recompensed by the powers of song. The lark and the redbreast, victim species (both being greedily eaten in France), have the gift of poesy bestowed upon them to console them for their future sorrows.

The most exquisite sense a bird possesses, is sight. Tho acuteness and sensibility of the retina are in direct proportion to the rapidity of wing. The swift, according to Belon's caleulation, can see a gnat distinctly, at the distance of more than five hundred yards. The kite, hovering in the air at a height beyond our feeble vision, porceives with ease the small dead minnow floating on the surface of the lake, and is cognizant of the imprudence of the poor little field-mouse as it timidly ventures out of its hole. All God has done and made, He has thoroughly well done and made. If He had not exactly porportioned the visual powers of the bird of prey, or the swallow, to its dashing flight, tho mere extreme velocity of the bird would have only served to break its neck. Partridges constantly kill themselves against the iron wires of electric telegraphs; and nothing is more common than to find thrushes and larks with dislocated vertebra), when they fall into the large vertical net which is used in France by twilight sportsmen.

Perhaps, after all we have said and seen, the sense of touch is the most perfect in birds, and the organs of feeling are endowed with a subtilty of perception more exquisito even than those of sight. In fact, air being the most variable and unstable of elements, birds would be endowed by nature with the gift of universal sensibility, enabling them to appreciate and foretell the slightest perturbations of tho medium they inhabit. In consequence, tho feathered race are armed with a nervous impressionability which comprises the different properties of the hygrometer, the thermometer, the barometer, and tho electroscope. A tempest which takes the man of science by surprise, has, long before, given warning to the birds of the sea. The noddies, cormorants, gulls, and petrels, know twenty-fours beforehand, by means of tho magnetic telegraph which exists within them, the exact day and moment when ocean is going into one of his great rages, opening wide his green abysses, and flinging the angry foam of his waves in insult against the forehead of the cliffs. Some birds are the harbingers of wintery storms; others usher in the advent of spring. Tho raven and the nightingale announce the coming of the tempest by a peculiar form of bird's expression, which they both seem to have borrowed from the vocabulary of the frog—a preVol. IX.—No. 54.-3 E eminently nervous animal, to whom the science of galvanism is greatly indebted. The chaffinch, in unsettled weather, recommends the traveler to take his umbrella, and advises the housekeeper not to bo in a hurry to hang out her linen. Certain mystic geniuses have attributed this faculty of divination possessed by birds, to some special sensibility, acquainting them with the action of the electric currents that traverse the atmosphere, and accurately informing them of their direction. Nor is thero any scientific argument which can be confidently opposed to such a theory.