38 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
*“‘ How easy,” says this fanciful writer, “‘is it to conceive 
the change of a winged fish, flying at times through the water, 
at times through the air, into a bird flying always through 
the air!” It is a law of nature, that the chain of being, 
are as amusing as those of a fairy tale, and quite as extreme. Take 
the following extract as an instance : — 
‘s Winged or flying fish, stimulated by the desire of prey, or the fear 
of death, or pushed near the shore by the billows, have fallen among 
reeds or herbage, whence it was not possible for them to resume their 
flight to the sea, by means of which they had contracted their first 
facility of flying. Then their fins, being no longer bathed in the sea- 
water, were split, and became warped by their dryness. While they 
found, among the reeds and herbage among which they fell, any ali- 
ments to support them, the vessels of their fins, being separated, were 
lengthened and clothed with beards, or, to speak more justly, the mem- 
branes, which before kept them adherent to each other, were meta- 
morphosed. The beard formed of these warped membranes was 
lengthened. The skin of these animals was insensibly covered with 
a down of the same color with the skin, and this down gradually in- 
creased. The little wings they had under their belly, and which, 
like their wings, helped them to walk in the sea, became feet, and 
served them to walk on land. There were also other small changes 
in their figure. The beak and neck of some were lengthened, and 
those of others shortened. The conformity, however, of the first 
figure subsists in the whole, and it will be always easy to know it. 
Examine all the species of fowls, large and small, even those of the 
Indies, those which are tufted or not, those whose feathers are 
reversed, such as we see at Damietta— that is to say, whose plu- 
mage runs from the tail to the head—and you will find species 
of fish quite similar, scaly or without scales. All species of parrots, 
whose plumages are so different, the rarest and the most singu- 
lar-marked birds, are, conformable to fact, painted like them with 
black, brown, gray, yellow, green, red, violet color, and those of gold 
and azure; and all this precisely in the same parts where the plu- 
mages of those birds are diversified in so curious a manner.” — 
Telliamed, p. 224, ed. 1750. 
