158 ORGANIC EVOLUTION CONSIDERED 



movement, and consequently do not show the method 

 of evolving wings that are useful for flight. The 

 penguin uses its wings as fins and, doubtless, has been 

 so using them for many generations, and yet we do 

 not know that this use is increasing their size and pre- 

 paring them to become birds of flight. Their wings 

 have been in constant use, and yet, according to the 

 theory of evolution, they have decreased in size till 

 they are useless as organs of flight and comparatively 

 useless for any purpose. 



We have no evidence to show that the wing of the 

 bird has been evolved from the fore leg of the rep- 

 tile. The oldest known fossil bird's wings were 

 widely different from the legs of reptiles. There is 

 no clew whatever to the evolution of feathers, which 

 all birds have possessed, and which no known reptiles 

 have possessed. 



We cannot regard feathers, therefore, as something 

 transient and of little importance. To say that feath- 

 ers are homologous to the scales of reptiles is no ex- 

 planation of their origin. We have no reason to 

 believe that the scales of reptiles can, or ever have 

 become feathers. The structure of a feather is ex- 

 tremely unlike that of a scale. If we try to imagine 

 the steps by which the scales on a lizard's fore legs 

 could be developed into the great complex feathers 

 necessary for flight, we utterly fail to make the transi- 

 tions, and yet evolution assumes that feathers had 

 some such origin. 



Evolutionists assume that by disuse the legs of 

 most snakes have entirely disappeared, while in the 

 Python, rudimentary bones, marking the position of 

 one pair of legs, remain. Some lizards have no legs, 

 others have a rudimentary pair, others four small and 

 comparatively f unctionless legs, while most have four 



