This is certainly a very remarkable feature, but it gains 

 an added interest from the fact that it has a parallel in the 

 history of the development of the wing in the game-birds. 

 If you look carefully at the downy chicks of the pheasant, 

 or even at bam-door fowls, you wiU remark that the wing- 

 quills develop with surprising rapidity : so that they have 

 feathered wings while the rest of the body is still down- 

 covered. This enables them the more easily to escape 

 prowling foxes and other enemies. In young ducks exactly 

 the opposite condition obtains, the body is fuUy feathered 

 long before the feathers of the wings appear. And this 

 because they do not need to fly when danger threatens, 

 but take to the water instead. But to return to the chicks of 

 the pheasant. The wing of the chick develops at a very 

 rapid rate. Within a few hours after hatching, the first 

 traces of the coming flight feathers can be seen, and presently 

 a large wing is covering each side of the tiny body. At this 

 stage many often die. The wings, which can then be examined 

 at leisure, reveal an extremely interesting condition. For 

 they repeat the features which obtain in the wing of the 

 nestling hoatzin : inasmuch as the outermost quills are also, 

 as yet, non-existent ; and there is a free finger-tip. But it 

 is not nearly so long as in the hoatzin, and there is no terminal 

 claw. Surely, from this, we may infer that the delayed 

 development of the outer quills is a survival of a time when 



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