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-necessary feather-ideal; Dinosaurs began at 

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

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

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

 teryx seems to have been very near the true line of 

 descent. 



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

 told m}^riads of generations of l)irds which have succeeded 

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

 many more fossils ma}' be discovered, for the hints given 

 us in the anatomy of ]:)irds, 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 Init 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 Dmo- 

 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, the}^ were united in a common stock. But we 

 must guard against the notion that birds are descended 

 from any grou}) of living reptiles; which is as fallacious 

 an idea as that we Americans trace oiu* direct descent from 



