Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume,

take a nice deep breath in,

let it out slowly, and off we go.

Tonight we are returning to another one of your favorites.

Castle's Book of Birds, from the text of Dr. Brehm and Thomas Reimer Jones, FRS, Professor of Natural History and Comparative Anatomy in Kings College, London, with

upwards of 400 engravings and a series of colored plates.

Written in four volumes,

Volume 1.

Published by Castle, Petter and Galpin, London and New York.

Let's pick up where we left off midway through the editor's introduction.

In taking therefore a brief survey of the principal groups or orders under which the feathered races have been distributed, we will begin with those appointed to live on trees.

Inasmuch as these are regarded by the author of the following pages

as being entitled to the highest rank in the class to which they belong,

rivaling in intelligence, as some of them do, the apes and monkeys, of which they are in general. the a You people in this country have any adequate conception of a tropical forest, and consequently

are scarcely prepared to see whole races of animals constructed specially for

a residence in the umbrages wilderness within its pathless precincts.

The great forest of the Amazon, in all its primeval grandeur,

stretches for a thousand miles from north to south,

and probably three or four hundred from east to west.

...