8 The Bird 



like creatures before she struck the right adjustments. 

 Pterodactyls failed to become birds because they depended 

 on a broad web of skin, like the wing of a bat, thus miss- 

 ing the all-necessar\^ feather-ideal; Dinosaurs began at 

 the wrong end, learning to stand on their hind feet and 

 to hop, but never the delights of fUght. These offshoots 

 sooner or later were forced to the wall, but Archceop- 

 teryx seems to have been ver}' near the true line of 

 descent. 



But after all, what a meagre record we have of the un- 

 told myriads of generations of birds which have succeeded 

 each other through ages past! It is to be hoped that 

 many more fossils may be discovered, for the hints given 

 us in the anatomy of birds, and the glimpses of past his- 

 tory which flash out from the development of the chick 

 within the egg, — all this evidence is becoming ever more 

 and more clouded and illegible. 



Having learned that birds are descended from a rep- 

 tile-like ancestor, it is interesting to search among living 

 reptiles for the one which most resembles birds, and we 

 have no choice but to select the alligator — cold-blooded, 

 scaly, bound to the earth though he is. A second near 

 relation is to be found in the group of long-extinct Dino- 

 saurs. A complete record of past ages would show the 

 ancestral stems of alligators, Dinosaurs, and birds grad- 

 ually approaching each other until somewhere, at some 

 time, they were united in a common stock. But we 

 must guard against the notion that birds are descended 

 from any group of living reptiles; which is as fallacious 

 an idea as that we Americans trace our direct descent from 



