Books with title The Evolutionist at Large

Why modern birds have lost their long flexible tails it is not difficult to see. The tail descends to all higher vertebrates as an heirloom from the fishes, the amphibia, and their other aquatic predecessors. With these it is a necessary organ of locomotion in swimming, and it remains almost equally useful to the lithe and gliding lizard on land. Indeed, the snake is but a lizard who has substituted this wriggling motion for the use of legs altogether; and we can trace a gradual succession from the four-legged true lizards, through snake-like forms with two legs and wholly rudimentary legs, to the absolutely limbless serpents themselves. But to flying birds, on the contrary, a long bony tail is only an inconvenience. All that they need is a little muscular knob for the support of the tail-feathers, which they employ as a rudder in guiding their flight upward or downward, to right or left. The elongated waving tail of the Solenhofen bird, with its single pair of quills, must have been a comparatively ineffectual and clumsy piece of mechanism for steering an aërial creature through its novel domain. Accordingly, the bones soon grew fewer in number and shorter in length, while the feathers simultaneously arranged themselves side by side upon the terminal hump.