Excerpt from A Manual of British Ornithology, Vol. 1: Being a Short Description of the Birds of Great Britain and Ireland, Including the Essential Characters of the Species, Genera, Families, and Orders; The Land Birds

Birds are warm-blooded, oviparous, vertebrate animals. They have a brain, enclosed within a skull, a spinal marrow, protected by vertebrae, nerves issuing from these central parts, and distributed to all the organs. Their heart is double, one side of it receiving the blood from the veins, and sending it out by the pulmonary artery into the lungs, whence, on being subjected to the influence of the air, it re turns by the pulmonary veins to the other side of the heart, which transmits it, by the aorta, to all parts of the body.20 introduction.

Their lungs are small, and incapable of much dilatation, but they communicate by apertures, with cells or membranous sacs situated in the chest, and among the muscles, and be tween them and the skin, and even with the cavities of the bones. Hence their respiration is said to be double. They have an internal skeleton, for the support and motion of the parts are furnished with muscles, or organs subservient to motion; with three double organs of sense, namely, eyes, ears, and nasal cavities with a tongue, which is partly an organ of taste, partly of prehension, and with a general sense of touch or feeling situated in the skin. Organs of assimilation, for the conversion of external substances into their own nature, and of propagation, for the continuance of their species, are also to be enumerated; together with other parts, which require to be somewhat particularly ex plained. For this purpose, let us take any bird, in which the external parts are easily distinguished, a Shrike, for example.

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