THE BIRD 



CHAPTER I 



ANCESTORS 



JiTH the exception of Astronomy, the science 

 which most powerfully dominates our imagina- 

 tion is Palaeontology, or the study of the life of 

 bygone ages. Of all things in Nature, the stars symbolize 

 absolute immensity, their distances stretching out beyond 

 our utmost calculation. So the revelations of Palaeon- 

 tology take us far beyond the sciences of life on the earth 

 to-day, and open vistas of time reaching back more than 

 five-hundred-fold the duration of the sway of mankind. 

 Fossil bones — philosophically more precious than any 

 jewels which Mother Earth has yielded — are the only 

 certain clews to the restoration of the life of past ages, 

 milHons of years before the first being awakened into 

 human consciousness from the sleep of the animal mind. 



Until recently, Palaeontology^ has been popularly con- 

 sidered one of the dryest and most uninteresting of the 

 'ologies, but now that the fossil collections in our museums 

 are being arranged so logically and so interestingly, the 

 most casual lover of Nature can read as he runs some of 



