LEARNING TO FLY 155 



How did he get out of this narrow space when he found it so 

 difficult to rise from the ground in an open field ? Possibly 

 some current of air between the buildings assisted him, or 

 perhaps necessity made his efforts more violent. The point 

 has not been decided. 



' "Finally, on the 1 3th of October he had become a 'master.' 

 He flew 200 or 300 metres through the air and returned to 

 his point of departure, i.e. his pen, without allowing himself 

 to be tempted away by his wild brothers in the mountains. 

 At this date he weighed 10 kilogs., while the stretch of his 

 wings was 2*55 metres. Gradually his absences from home 

 increased in length, but he always came back without 

 becoming in any way wilder. 



' " Unfortunately, he had not the dread of mankind 

 possessed by his wild brothers of the mountains, and one 

 of those brutes with a gun, who must kill everything they can 

 get near, succeeded in approaching him as he was sitting on 

 a rock, thinking no harm of any one, and shot him dead. 

 The ' sportsman ' was rather astonished on approaching the 

 dead vulture to find a rose-coloured ribbon round his neck."' 



The comparative unreadiness of the large birds to take 

 to the air as compared with small ones is very interesting 

 when taken in connection with the fact that the biggest birds 

 do not fly at all. The archaeopteryx, or earliest fossil bird 

 that can fairly be called a bird and not a reptile, is about the 

 size of a crow ; and we must take it that from this stem birds 

 increased in size, as well as diminished, until they came to a 

 point at which their young could not be got to fly at all. We 

 usually speak of the ostrich or the great auk as having ' lost ' 

 the power of flight, but it would probably be truer to say 

 that they failed to acquire it. The explanation of the flight- 

 lessness of the largest birds is not easy. It does not seem to 

 be due to the mechanical difficulty of supporting a given 



