16 The Bird 
If its lines lie in happy places, its race is established, 
and it pursues and flees, it fights and plays, it sings with 
joy or pants with fear, and Evolution marks another 
success in its inexorable movement onward and upward, 
—a new species is born! 
Earth has few secrets from the birds. With wings 
and legs there is hardly a spot to which they cannot and 
indeed have not penetrated. Some find food and con- 
tentment in the desolate wastes of the far North; others 
spend almost all of their life on or above the sea far from 
Fig. 7.—Skull of Phororhacos, drawn to scale with Fig. 8. 1/6 natural size. 
land; thousands revel in the luxuriance of reeking trop- 
ical jungles; a lesser number are as perfectly suited to 
the blazing dust of the desert; and there are birds which 
burrow deep into the very earth itself. Day and night; 
heat and cold; water, earth, and air, have all been con- 
quered by the thirteen or fourteen thousand species of 
birds which share the earth with us at the present day. 
These brethren of ours, whose clans have so bravely 
conquered the dangers of millions of vears, and at last 
have gained a foremost rank in the scale of living crea- 
