INTRODUCTION. 



A BIRD 



Is a feathered vertebrate animal ; or, to describe it more fully, it is an air-breathing, 

 warm-blooded, feathered, oviparous (egg-laying) , vertebrate animal, having a four- 

 chambered heart, and a complete double circulation. Birds occupy a place in nature 

 intermediate between the mammals and the reptiles, and many naturalists consider a 

 bird to be merely a modified reptile. Be that as it may ; we are morally certain that 

 thousands of years ago there existed on the earth huge, lizard-like birds, of many of 

 which we know nothing. The oldest known form of which we have any actual 

 knowledge is the celebrated Archceopteryx, a fossil found by Andreas Wagner, in the 

 Oolitic slate of Solenhofer, Bavaria, in 1861. This reptile bird had a lizard-like 

 tail bordered with feathers, and jaws armed with teeth. 



Of late years, many important osteological discoveries have been made, and from 



Ostrich. 



the reconstructed skeletons we are able to form some idea of the size and shape of a 

 few of the many huge and strange birds which lived and died in the forgotten past. 

 The Harpagornis, an immense raptorial bird, or some similar monster, may have orig- 

 inated the stories of the Roc of nursery lore. Still later, we have the Dodo of Mauri- 

 tius, and the Moa of New Zealand, the latter a giant bird, much larger than the 



