THE BIRD 
CHAPTER I 
ANCESTORS 
ITH the exception of Astronomy, the science 
which most powerfully dominates our imagina- 
tion is Paleontology, or the study of the life of 
bygone ages. Of all things in Nature, the stars symbolize 
absolute immensity, their distances stretching out beyond 
our utmost calculation. So the revelations of Palzon- 
tology take us far beyond the sciences of life on the earth 
to-day, and open vistas of time reaching back more than 
five-hundred-fold the duration of the sway of mankind. 
Fossil bones—philosophically more precious than any 
jewels which Mother Earth has yielded—are the only 
certain clews to the restoration of the life of past ages, 
millions of years before the first being awakened into 
human consciousness from the sleep of the animal mind. 
Until recently, Paleontology has been popularly con- 
sidered one of the dryest and most uninteresting of the 
’ologies, but now that the fossil collections in our museums 
are being arranged so logically and so interestingly, the 
most casual lover of Nature can read as he runs some of 
