i6 



The Bird 



If its lines lie in happy places, its race is established, 

 and it pursues and flees, it fights and plays, it sings with 

 joy or pants with fear, and Evolution marks another 

 success in its inexorable movement onward and upward, 

 — a new species is born! 



Earth has few secrets from the birds. With wings 

 and legs there is hardly a spot to which they cannot and 

 indeed have not penetrated. Some find food and con- 

 tentment in the desolate wastes of the far North; others 

 spend almost all of their life on or above the sea far from 



Fig. 7. — Skull of Phororfmcos, drawn to scale with Fig. 8. 1/6 natural size. 



land; thousands revel in the luxuriance of reeking trop- 

 ical jungles; a lesser number are as perfectly suited to 

 the blazing dust of the desert; and there are birds which 

 burrow deep into the ver}^ earth itself. Day and night; 

 heat and cold; water, earth, and air, have all been con- 

 quered by the thirteen or fourteen thousand species of 

 birds which share the earth with us at the present day. 



These brethren of ours, whose clans have so bravely 

 conquered the dangers of millions of years, and at last 

 have gained a foremost rank in the scale of living crea- 



