74 THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS 
character of the different muscles. Remarkable also 
is the large size of (ge Chicken’s Elevator muscle. 
Its wild kinsman, haunting the jungle as it does, has 
to rise to its perch without any wind to help it, so 
that all the work of raising the wing must fall upon 
the muscle. But the effort required is not a pro- 
longed one, and so the muscle is pale. In the 
Sparrow-Hawk and, I believe, in other birds of prey, 
the Elevator is very small. Since they usually start 
to fly from a perch at some height above the ground, 
there is no difficulty in getting up speed enough to 
make the office of the Elevator largely a sinecure. 
The brown flesh on a Chicken’s leg, though the 
human palate pronounces it inferior, is, nevertheless, 
when regarded as muscle, of distinctly better quality. 
The Fowl is primarily a runner, not a flyer; hence, 
presumably, the darker colour and the greater 
strength and endurance of the leg muscles. More- 
over, these muscles are kept on the strain throughout 
the night; by the bending of the knee and ankle 
joints the machinery of muscles and tendons through- 
out the leg is set to work and the bird’s toes strongly 
grip the perch. His weight keeps the legs bent, and 
the bending of the legs keeps muscles and tendons 
to their work. Were they to relax for a moment the 
bird would probably lose his life; he would fall to the 
ground and some hungry carnivore, that happened 
to be prowling about, would seize him. But though 
in the Fowl the leg muscles are darker in colour than 
those of the breast and wings, they are not in section 
ridged and granulated like the great Pectoral of 
birds that are strong flyers. In the Moorhen, I have 
noted that the leg muscles are rather more ridged 
