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. 



