6 The Bird 



it could wriggle or push itself with its powerful toes into 

 the water. The thought of the untold generations of 

 birds which must have preceded this toothed, wingless, 

 feathered being, makes the mind falter at the vast stretches 

 of time during which evolution has been unceasingly at 

 work. 



When we examine the skull of Hesperornis we get a 

 clew to the reason why this great creature, nearly as large 

 as a man, succumbed when some slight change in its 

 environment called for new adjustments in its habits of 

 life. Its brain was comparatively smaller than that of 

 any existing bird; and this absence of brain power im- 

 plied a total lack of that ingenuity, so prominent in the 

 crow, which, when man alters the face of the land, changes 

 its habits, and with increasing wit holds its own against 

 guns and traps. 



When Hesperornis passed, it was succeeded by birds 

 much smaller in size but of greater wit — loons and grebes 

 — which hold their own even to the present day. 



When in the depth of the winter, a full hundred miles 

 from the nearest land, one sees a loon in the path of the 

 steamer, listens to its weird, maniacal laughter, and sees it 

 slowly sink downward through the green w^aters, it truly 

 seems a hint of the bird-life of long-past ages. 



We must now pass back, as nearly as can be estimated, 

 over two millions of years, through the ages when the 

 Iguanodonfs and Megalosaurs lived, long before the first 

 serpents had evolved and about the time when the first 

 timid forerunners of the mammals made their appear- 

 ance, — tiny insect-eating creatures which were fated to 



