98 The Bird 
Legs 
The leg of our chicken, as we have seen, is attached 
to the great bone of the thigh-girdle. Being used for 
locomotion on land, the foot is not very different from 
that of a lizard, but there seems something very strange 
about the leg. Can it be possible that a chicken’s knees 
bend backward? If so, it must be different from all 
other two-legged or four-legged creatures. Much of a 
bird’s leg is concealed beneath its feathers, and when we 
see the bones as far up as the thigh-joint, we understand 
our mistake at once, and see that a bird has knees which 
bend in the same way as our own, that is, forward in an 
opposite direction from the elbow. The knees of a bird 
are usually concealed within the skin of the body, as in 
the short-legged ducks, and are never visible outside 
the plumage. Hence the wide-spread mistake concern- 
ing them. For this reason the femur, or thigh-bone, is, 
in birds, relatively very short, even in the long-shanked 
herons and flamingos, the extra length of limb resulting 
from the elongation of the next two lower joints. 
The thigh-bone, or femur, alone forms the upper leg, 
or “second joint,’ and two bones, as in the forearm, 
the next portion below. One of these, the tibia, is much 
the larger and is the ‘‘drumstick” of the chicken.* When 
we cut the dark meat from this portion, our knife some- 
times slits off a splinter, which is the second bone of this 
joint, the fibula. 
* To the lower end of this are fused, in the bird, the bones which corre- 
spond to our heel-bone and the small astragalus. 
