I20 



Birds of the Primeval World. 



became fishes, and that after ages of time 

 the fishes got backbones, and some of them 

 became more and more hke Hzards, and, 

 being able to live in either land or water, 

 they went ashore and took to feeding on 

 vegetables, until in the course of ages they 

 never thought of going back to the water 

 except to get a drink, and as some changed 

 one way and some another, and gradually 

 got warm blood, and wanted something to 

 keep the cold out, some grew feathers and 



they would grow up to be very different 

 women, but for all that they would both be 

 women; but Darwin answered them that if 

 circumstances and habits would make a 

 little change in twenty years it would make 

 a bigger change in twenty thousand years, 

 and besides that, he said some other things 

 that are pretty hard to answer. 



He said, for instance, that all the dogs 

 came from one wild stock something like 

 the wolf, but, although they had been only 



UPPER VIEW. 

 JAWS OF HESPERORNIS HALF NATURAL SIZE. 



UPPER VIEW. 

 JAWS OF ICTHYORNIS TWICE NATURAL SIZE. 



became birds, and some let their hair grow, 

 and became kangaroos and opossums, and 

 gave up laying eggs as their fathers, or 

 rather I should say, their mothers, had 

 always done before them. 



A good many people laughed at this 

 theory of Darwin's, for they said that, 

 although circumstances and habits alter 

 the character of man or any other animal, 

 they cannot alter the species, or sort. It 

 was true, of course, that if a woman died 

 and left two little infant girls, and one was 

 adopted by a family of wealth and refine- 

 ment, and the other brought up in an in- 

 stitution and then sent to work on a farm, 



a few thousand years in domestication, a 

 visit to a dog show showed that they had 

 been changed in ever so many directions. 

 Who would suppose that the mastiffs, the 

 Newfoundland dogs, the blood hounds, 

 and bull dogs, and greyhounds, and Italian 

 greyhounds, and spaniels and pug dogs 

 and toy terriers, all came from one family? 

 And yet there is no doubt that they did. 

 So too with the pigeons. The fan tails, 

 tumblers, carriers, and all came from one 

 family — the blue rock pigeon — and all 

 those changes have been effected in do- 

 mestication. Then he pointed to the poll 

 cattle of Aberdeen that have given up 



