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APPENDIX 
visited and Emperor eggs secured is graphically told in 
The Winter Journey. The question now arises, Has ‘the 
weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has ever been made’ 
added appreciably to our knowledge of birds? 
“It is admitted that birds are descended from bipedal 
reptiles which flourished some millions of years ago—rep- 
tiles in build not unlike the kangaroo. From Archaeo- 
pteryx of Jurassic times we know primeval birds had teeth, 
three fingers with claws on each hand, anda long lizard-like 
tail provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true 
feathers. But unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, 
nor yet the fossil birds found in America, throw any light 
on the origin of feathers. Ornithologists and others who 
have devoted much time to the study of birds have as a 
rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that 
the scales along the margin of the hand and forearm and 
along each side of the tail were elongated, frayed and other- 
wise modified to form the wing and tail quills, and that 
later other scales were altered to provide a coat capable of 
preventing loss of heat. But as it happens, a study of the 
development of feathers affords no evidence that they were 
made out of scales. There are neither rudiments of scales 
nor feathers in very young bird embryos. In the youngest 
of the three Emperor embryos there are, however, feather 
rudiments in the tail region,—the embryo was probably 
seven or eight days old—but in the two older embryos 
there are a countless number of feather rudiments, z.e. of 
minute pimples known as papillae. 
“In penguins as in many other birds there are two 
distinct crops of feather papillae, viz.: a crop of relatively 
large papillae which develop into prepennae, the fore- 
runners of true feathers (pennae), and a crop of small papil- 
lae which develop into preplumulae, the forerunners of 
true down feathers (plumulae). 
“In considering the origin of feathers we are not con- 
cerned with the true feathers (pennae), but with the nest- 
ling feathers (prepennae), and more especially with the 
papillae from which the prepennae are developed. What 
we want to know is, Do the papillae which in birds develop 
