340 



The Bird 



flyers. The latter, in fact, use their wings, the feathers 

 of which have very stiff and long quills, as much in diving 

 under water as in flying in the air, and, strangely enough, 

 they are said to swim breast upward, propelling themselves 

 by means of both wings and feet. Grebes, too, are very 

 weak of wing, and these birds cannot rise from level ground, 

 no matter how much of a fluttering run is taken, and even 

 in the water much splashing and headway are needed. 



Perhaps the most wonderful birds in the world are 

 penguins, and the strangest part of these strange birds 

 is the wing. There is no doubt that they are descended 

 from birds which possessed the power of flight; but the 

 penguins have discarded this gift and have returned to 

 a life in the sea, whence in long ages past their forebears 

 had crawled out upon land. As in the ostriches, the 

 relics of flight-feathers have increased greatly in number, 

 but have become small and scaly, and the wings have 

 virtuall}' become flippers or fins. Instead of a given num- 

 ber of feathers, di\'ided into well-marked series, the pad- 

 dles of a I penguin are covered thickly with small feather- 

 scales, and the rigiditj' of the wings, together with the 

 rotary movement at the shoulder-joint, make the propeller 

 of a slii|) an apt simile. The colour of the feather-scales 

 on the upper side of the wing is dark, like the l:)ack of 

 the bird, but those on the luider side have run rampant, 

 the white and black being mixed irregularly, not corre- 

 sponding even in the two wings of an individual bird. 



The outline of the wing is exactly like that of a shark's 

 fin, the flatness and breadth including even the bones, 

 while (also like a fin) all of the bending quality of a wing 



