98 THE INFANCY OF ANIMALS 



tudinal striping is most completely developed, or perhaps 

 we should say has been most completely retained in the 

 emu ; for if we take the condition of the skull, and of the 

 palatal bones in particular as our standard, whereby to 

 measure which birds have departed least from their 

 ancestral heritage, the emu must be regarded as standing 

 nearest to the ancestral birds, or, as is more commonly 

 expressed, is the most " primitive " of living birds. 



As a reference to our illustration will show, the nesthng 

 emu is marked from one end of the body to the other 

 by a series of alternate black and white stripes, of about 

 equal width : though on the crown of the head these 

 stripes have broken up to form an irregular " marbled " 

 pattern. In the newly hatched bird irregular black 

 stripes and spots invade even the beak and legs, but 

 these soon vanish. In the young of the nearly related 

 cassowary the stripes have disappeared from the head 

 and neck, while on the trunk they have assumed the form 

 of relatively narrow white stripes on a ground of dark 

 brownish black. In the rhea chick the reduction of the 

 striping has proceeded still further, but the primitive 

 pattern is still there. The ostrich, while retaining a 

 number of stripes on the neck, has lost those on the body, 

 or rather they have become disintegrated by the curious 

 transformation which the down feathers have undergone, 

 the ends having become produced in broad, flattened, 

 and twisted horny ribbons resembling shavings ; thus 

 the black areas of these feathers have become broken up, 

 and present a mottled appearance of bla^k and buff. The 

 grebes cannot be regarded as even remotely related to 

 the ostrich tribe, yet the nesthngs of these birds display 

 a precisely similar coloration, alternate stripes of black 

 and white running the whole length of the body. 



