8 The Bird 
like creatures before she struck the right adjustments. 
Pterodactyls failed to become birds because they depended 
on a broad web of skin, like the wing of a bat, thus miss- 
ing the all-necessary feather-ideal; Dinosaurs began at 
the wrong end, learning to stand on their hind feet and 
to hop, but never the delights of flight. These offshoots 
sooner or later were forced to the wall, but Archeop- 
teryx seems to have been very near the true line of 
descent. 
But after all, what a meagre record we have of the un- 
told myriads of generations of birds which have succeeded 
each other through ages past! It is to be hoped that 
many more fossils may be discovered, for the hints given 
us in the anatomy of birds, and the glimpses of past his- 
tory which flash out from the development of the chick 
within the egg,—all this evidence is becoming ever more 
and more clouded and illegible. 
Having learned that birds are descended from a rep- 
tile-like ancestor, it is interesting to search among living 
reptiles for the one which most resembles birds, and we 
have no choice but to select the alligator-—cold-blooded, 
scaly, bound to the earth though he is. A second near 
relation is to be found in the group of long-extinct Dino- 
saurs. A complete record of past ages would show the 
ancestral stems of alligators, Dinosaurs, and birds grad- 
ually approaching each other until somewhere, at some 
time, they were united in a common stock. But we 
must guard against the notion that birds are descended 
from anv group of living reptiles; which is as fallacious 
an idea as that we Americans trace our direct descent from 
