92 UNDER THE OPEN SKY 



ground-loving birds, like the meadow-lark 

 and the blackbird, and not to be compared, 

 even in proportion to the size of his small 

 body, with the firm scratching feet of the 

 grouse or of the chicken. 



WHAT THE HUMMER ONCE WAS 



The modern scientist is a great pedigree 

 hunter. He is never content with knowing 

 what an animal is: he wants to know even 

 more why he is so, and, most of all, how he 

 became so. The answer to this last ques- 

 tion is often very perplexing and sometimes 

 quite unsatisfactory. But in probing the 

 ancestry of any of our birds one of the main 

 helps is the study of his relatives. When 

 they all differ from him on the side of sim- 

 plicity, it needs little shrewdness to decide 

 that he was probably once much as they 

 still are. When we know that the nearest 

 of kin to the humming-birds are the whip- 

 poor-wills, the night-hawks, and the chim- 

 ney-swifts, the story begins to loom up be- 

 fore the scientific imagination. 



The humming-birds must once have been 



