FLYING REPTILES 77 



those enormous wings? For his joints indicate that 

 these wings could not be folded snugly about the body 

 like those of a bat or a bird; from their very size some 

 other method was necessary and it would seem that he, 

 as well as other flying dragons, walked as shown in the 

 picture with wings pointed upwards. 



There have been various speculations as to how the 

 smaller pterodactyls carried themselves and our illus- 

 trations show two suggestions as to how they might 

 have walked, on all fours or erect. And Frank Buck- 

 land, we think it was he, thought that Pterodactyls 

 might have had almost as varied modes of locomotion 

 as Milton's fiend who 



With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way 



And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies. 



There is no more reason to suppose that pterodactyls 

 big and httle all behaved ahke any more than all birds 

 fly, or swim, or run ahke. 



The albatross, among the modern monarchs of the air, 

 can not rise from the deck of a ship and has great diffi- 

 culty even in rising from the surface of a calm sea, not 

 infrequently paddling and flapping for a hundred 

 yards or more before clearing the water. On the other 

 hand, the ostrich that can outrun a horse can not fly 

 at all and between these two extremes we have every 

 imaginable condition of flying and running, to say 

 nothing of swimming and jumping. 



Lastly — to repeat an oft propounded query (p. 659 

 Greatest Fljdng Creature) — do Pteranodon and the big 

 birds of to-day mark the limit of size that may be at- 

 tained by flying creatures, do Nature's flying machines 

 stop at a weight of twenty-five or thirty or at the out- 

 side forty pounds? To reverse the proposition, is the 

 ostrich big because he doesn't fly or, doesn't he fly be- 

 cause he is big? 



