Crossword-Solution: OSCINES 7 letters, 3 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 9

What a multitude of birds and fishes are taken by the art and contrivance of man only, and which are so delicious to our taste that one would be tempted sometimes to believe that this Providence which watches over us was an Epicurean! Though we think there are some birds--the alites and oscines[240], as our augurs call them--which were made merely to foretell events.

But they here mean those birds which are used in augury: _alites_ are the birds whose flight was observed by the augurs, and _oscines_ the birds from whose voices they augured.

The author's preference would have been to begin the roll with the most interesting birds, those to which he gave the largest share of his attention, namely, the oscines, but he has decided to follow the order and nomenclature of the Check-List of North American birds as arranged by the American Ornithologists' Union.

But he is ranked among the oscines, and seems to know it; and, after all, it is only the common fault of singers not to be able to detect their own want of tunefulness.

But _he_ was never accused of not being noisy enough, while we have one bird who, though he is classed with the oscines, passes his life in almost unbroken silence.