INTRODUCTION. 



; IT M ' i 



A BIRD 



Is a feathered vertebrate animal ; or, to describe it more fully, it is an air-breathing, 

 warm-blooded, feathered, oviparous (egg-laying) , vertebrate animal, having a four- 

 chambered heart, and a complete double circulation. Birds occupy a place in nature 

 intermediate between the mammals and the reptiles, and many naturalists consider a 

 bird to be merely a modified reptile. Be that as it may ; we are morally certain that 

 thousands of years ago there existed on the earth huge, lizard-like birds, of many of 

 which we know nothing. The oldest known form of which we have any actual 

 knowledge is the celebrated Archceopteryx, a fossil found by Andreas Wagner, in the 

 Oolitic slate of Solenhofer, Bavaria, in 1861. This reptile bird had a lizard-like 

 tail bordered with feathers, and jaws armed with teeth. 



Of late years, many important osteological discoveries have bee*h made, and from 



Dodo. 



Ostrich. 



Moa. 



the reconstructed skeletons we are able to form some idea of the size and shape of a 

 few of the many huge and strange birds which lived and died in the forgotten past. 

 The Harpagornis, an immense raptorial bird, or some similar monster, may have orig- 

 inated the stories of the Roc of nursery lore. Still later, we have the Dodo of Mauri- 

 tius, and the Moa of New Zealand, the latter a giant bird, much larger than the 



