98 The Bird 



Legs 



The leg of our chicken, as we have seen, is attached 

 to the great bone of the thigh -girdle. Being used for 

 locomotion on land, the foot is not very different from 

 that of a lizard, but there seems something very strange 

 about the leg. Can it be possible that a chicken's knees 

 bend backward? If so, it must be different from all 

 other two-legged or four-legged creatures. Much of a 

 bird's leg is concealed beneath its feathers, and when we 

 see the bones as far up as the thigh -joint, w^e understand 

 our mistake at once, and see that a bird has knees which 

 bend in the same way as our own, that is, forward in an 

 opposite direction from the elbow. The knees of a bird 

 are usualh' concealed within the skin of the body, as in 

 the short-legged ducks, and are never visible outside 

 the plumage. Hence the wide-spread mistake concern- 

 ing them. For this reason the femur, or thigh-bone, is, 

 in birds, relatively very short, even in the long-shanked 

 herons and flamingos, the extra length of limb resulting 

 from the elongation of the next two low^er joints. 



The thigh-bone, or femur, alone forms the upper leg, 

 or ''second joint," and two bones, as in the forearm, 

 the next portion below. One of these, the tibia, is much 

 the larger and is the ''drumstick" of the chicken.* When 

 we cut the dark meat from this portion, our knife some- 

 times slits off a splinter, w^hich is the second bone of this 

 joint, the fibula. 



* To the lower end of this are fused, in the bird, the bones which corre- 

 spond to our heel-bone and the small astragalus. 



