CHAPTER XV 
TAILS 
~w gal have found that almost every organ of a bird’s 
wy; body may be compared directly with the corre- 
zee sponding structure in the body of a lizard or 
of some reptile, and the tail is no exception: although 
a lizard with a fan-shaped group of feathers sprouting 
from the root of his tail would certainly be an anomaly; 
and even if we substitute scales for the feathers, the result 
would be ridiculous and unmeaning. But glance at the 
photograph of the tail of our ancient, original-bird ac- 
quaintance, the Archopteryx, Fig. 315, which was taken 
expressly for this purpose. 
Take twenty feathers and arrange them as in Fig. 314 a, 
representing the tail of Archeopteryx; then rearrange 
them as in 3145, corresponding to the tail of modern birds, 
and the whole matter will be clear. Archsopteryx had 
twenty bones in its tail, all separate, long and slender, and 
arranged end to end, just as are the bones of a lizard’s 
tail to-day. But in the case of the bird of olden time 
a pair of feathers grew out, one on each side of the tail- 
bone, making forty tail-feathers in all. As we have seen, 
this bird was rather weak-winged and probably more 
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