6 The Bird 
it could wriggle or push itself with its powerful toes into 
the water. The thought of the untold generations of 
birds which must have preceded this toothed, wingless, 
feathered being, makes the mind falter at the vast stretches 
of time during which evolution has been unceasingly at 
work. 
When we examine the skull of Hesperornis we get a 
clew to the reason why this great creature, nearly as large 
as a man, succumbed when some slight change in its 
environment called for new adjustments in its habits of 
life. Its brain was comparatively smaller than that of 
any existing bird; and this absence of brain power im- 
plied a total lack of that ingenuity, so prominent in the 
crow, which, when man alters the face of the land, changes 
its habits, and with increasing wit holds its own against 
guns and traps. 
When Hesperornis passed, it was succeeded by birds 
much smaller in size but of greater wit—loons and grebes 
—which hold their own even to the present day. 
When in the depth of the winter, a full hundred miles 
from the nearest land, one sees a loon in the path of the 
steamer, listens to its weird, maniacal laughter, and sees it 
slowly sink downward through the green waters, it truly 
seems a hint of the bird-life of long-past ages. 
We must now pass back, as nearly as can be estimated, 
over two millions of vears, through the ages when the 
Iquanodonts and Megalosaurs lived, long before the first 
serpents had evolved and about the time when the first 
timid forerunners of the mammals made their appear- 
ance,—tiny insect-eating creatures which were fated to 
