PIRATES OF THE AIR
Perry’s father, whose entrance had awakened the boy, looked
quizzically at the lad as he stood rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“I don’t know about catching a unicorn,” the old merchant said, with
more than a trace of amused understanding in his tone, “but there’s a
big chance that you’ve caught a cold! You’d better get to bed, son,
just about as quickly as you know how. Then you can go ahead and
catch all the unicorns you want.”
The boy looked a little shame-faced at having disclosed the fact that
he had fallen asleep and had dreamed of the monsters on which his
mind had been set, but his father put his hand on the lad’s shoulder,
and said kindly:
“We’ll talk about this again some other time, Perry, and if you
really feel that you want to take up a fossil-hunter’s life, I’ll not
put anything in your way. I had hoped—” he added regretfully, “that
you would come right into my business, but after all, every tub must
stand on its own bottom. If you do go into the scientific work, I’ll
at least have the satisfaction of seeing some of my own old dreams
coming true, even though at second-hand. Slip along to bed, now, lad.”
Still only half-awake, Perry made some indistinct reply, undressed
and in a few minutes was fast asleep, this time too soundly even to
dream of monsters, until the light of a morning that had forgotten
those ancient times, woke him to the interests of a new day. It did
occur to him, though, as he was dressing, that the sun as it rose
that morning had risen just the same, thousands of years ago, and
would rise the same way hundreds of thousands of years hence, and he
wondered what kind of creatures would be living on the earth then.
By tacit consent, nothing was said at the breakfast table concerning
the subject that had been discussed the night before, for Perry’s
mother was inclined to jump to conclusions and it was an understood
thing in the household that the best time to inform her about
anything that was new was after it had been decided and settled. So
Perry started off for school, just as usual, and for over a week he
kept his ambitions to himself.
One Saturday morning, however, at breakfast time, his father said to
him:
“Perry, if you’ve nothing better to do, you might walk down with me
to the office this morning.”
“Sure!” the lad replied gladly, for these Saturday morning walks were
a great pleasure to him. The old financier always had his car come
round to the door sharp at 8:30 in the morning, but if the day were
fine, it was his custom to dismiss the chauffeur and to take the
three miles to his office at a brisk walk. He was a good walker and
had trained Perry to keep up a lively pace. This morning, as soon as
they had struck their gait, the merchant said to his son:
“I had a letter from your Uncle George last night.”
“Uncle George?” repeated the boy, questioningly.
“Yes.”
“Was it—” Perry hesitated.
“About you?” interpolated his father. “Yes, it was.”
“Oh, Father, what did he say?”
“I had asked him about his proposed expedition to Egypt, and
especially I wanted to find out when he planned to start.”
“And he’s going soon?”
“Two weeks from Monday.”
The boy was aching to hurl a series of questions at his father, to
bombard him with them, but experience had taught him not to show
impatience. Trying to hold himself in check, therefore, he said, only:
“Is he going for the Museum?”
“Yes. He wrote me that he is anxious to trace the ancestry of the
elephants. It appears that we don’t yet know where the elephants
came from, and we don’t know exactly from what kind of a beast the
elephant developed. The British have done a little work along that
line in lower Egypt, but for the time being, they have given up
excavating and the Museum has secured permission from the British
Government to explore the Fayum.”
“Uncle George will find whatever there is to find,” Perry asserted
confidently.
“Perhaps,” his father rejoined, smiling, “you may be the one to do
the finding.”
“Me?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, Father, then I’m really going?”
“Do you want to go so much?”
For an instant the boy was tongue-tied, for it came over him with a
rush that all his boyhood dreams were about to be realized. Then he
burst out with:
“Want to go, Father? I’m wild to go!”
“Well, then,” the other answered with mock resignation, “I suppose
we’ll have to arrange it. It’s true, son, that your uncle seems to
think the idea of your joining the expedition is a bit foolish. He
says you’re too young to know what you’re about and not strong enough
to be of any use to the expedition.”
“But—” began Perry, interrupting.
“On the other hand,” continued his father, not heeding the
interruption, “he says he’ll give you every chance to learn, though
he appears to discount nearly everything I said about your knowledge
of fossils and of paleontology in general. I don’t know, but perhaps
I did lay it on a bit thick. So it’ll be up to you, son, to make good
my words.”
“You bet I’ll do everything I can,” declared the lad excitedly. “Have
I got a regular appointment, Father?”
“You have not,” was the emphatic reply. “Museum authorities don’t
appoint boys to official positions on a scientific expedition, even
when they’re as lanky and overgrown as you. A man has got to be a
simon-pure expert before he can get a Museum appointment, and even
then, he’s got to work up through an assistantship. No, my boy,
you’re just accompanying your uncle and I’m footing the bill.
“I’ve always been willing to hand out cash freely for the scientific
work of the Museum and I had sent a cheque for five thousand to the
fund for this very expedition, before you had said anything to me
about your Patagonia idea. That subscription helped, to a certain
extent, but even so I don’t believe I could have persuaded the
Director to let you go along unless he was convinced that you were a
promising young paleontologist. You know I was away last week?”
“Yes.”
“I went to New York to see the Director of the American Museum about
you. One of your friends—an assistant curator, who knows our Director
down here—spoke up in your favor.”
“I can guess who that was!”
“Maybe, but you won’t find out from me.” The financier laughed. “The
American Museum director had to have his little joke, of course,” he
continued. “Do you know what he told me—
“‘Mr. Hunt,’ he said, and his eye had a twinkle I’ve seen there
several times, ‘a precocity in paleontology is a species new to me.’
“Of course, Perry, I had to back water a bit.”
“You needn’t have, Father,” protested Perry. “I don’t want to brag,
but I’ll just show him!”
“That’s the right spirit, my son,” replied the other, “but you’ve a
long road to travel. I went just far enough along that road myself to
see what a long journey it is.” For a moment the counting-room and
the figures and the complexities of modern business life faded away
from the old financier’s mind and he looked forward unseeingly and
reminiscently. “I’d have liked to have gone on with it,” he added,
“but other things came between.”
Perry kept silent a minute or two, then said, with boyish gentleness:
“We’ll be in on it together, Father, anyway. And I feel great about
it, really.”
“Of course we’ll be in on it together, as you put it,” the other
said, shaking himself free of memories, “and you’ll have to make a
record for yourself out there. It’s a good thing for you that you’re
so far ahead in your school work.”
Perry looked up surprisedly.
“How’s that?” he asked.
His father smiled quietly.
“I saw your headmaster the other day,” he answered. “You don’t
suppose you’d have had any chance to go if I found that you had been
neglecting your school work during the winter, do you?”
“But the exams?”
“Are all arranged. The headmaster said your term marks were high
enough to let an average examination pass you easily. The questions
are to be given me in a sealed envelope, I shall hand them to your
uncle, and at some convenient time, probably on board ship, you’re
to do the exams and your uncle will forward them to the school with
a letter saying that they were done in his presence and without any
assistance from him. A certain percentage is to be taken off for
irregularity, but unless you fall down hopelessly on the papers, I
feel sure that you will pass for the year.”
“You’ve thought of everything, Father,” rejoined the boy, gratefully.
“Well, son,” was the response, “it’s up to you to make the most of
it. The arrangements are a little sudden, but you can be ready in a
couple of weeks, can’t you?”
“I could be ready in half an hour,” Perry exclaimed enthusiastically.
“That’s rather precipitate,” his father commented, as they turned
into the street leading to the office, near the corner where the two
generally parted, “we won’t ask anything as rapid as that. But two
weeks from to-day, you’re to start for New York, and there you’ll
board the steamer for the Mediterranean. It’s a great chance for you,
my boy.”
During those two weeks Perry walked on air. He was the envy of all
his boy chums and by the time he was ready to start he had been
asked for so many fossil remains by his boy friends (who didn’t know
whether a Mosasaurus was the size of a sparrow or a whale) that he
would have had to discover a prehistoric cemetery in order to fulfill
all the requests. But the boy had been thoroughly trained not to make
promises he could not keep, and thus he saved himself from many an
awkward refusal later.
When the fated day came round, when he had seen his pith helmet and
other parts of his tropical outfit safely packed, Perry was so
excited that he could hardly talk, and his farewells were little
more than stammering interjections. His mother was disappointed, for
she expected some evidence of emotion, but the old merchant knew
boy nature better and was well pleased over the lad’s eagerness to
be off. Indeed, despite his years, the financier envied his son
and would have liked nothing better than to have been able to jump
aboard the train with him. But he contented himself with a hearty
handshake—quite a grown-up one, purposely—and stepped into his
motor-car resignedly, as the departing train rounded a distant curve.
As the through express thundered past station after station, Perry
had one swift pang of regret to think of the school commencement and
the games he would miss, but when he thought of what was ahead of
him, the thrill of doing real things came over him like a tornado and
swept aside all thoughts of school. That his learning was not over,
but only just beginning, he thoroughly realized, for along this line
had been his father’s parting words:
“In some fields, son,” he had said to Perry, “you can succeed by
making a bluff, but in scientific work you’ve got to know, and to
know that you know. Science is real and big, all the way through.”
Dr. Hunt met the boy at the New York terminal. Although uncle and
nephew knew each other in the vague way that relatives do, neither
had ever thought of the other as taking a place in his life, and each
anticipated the meeting with great interest.
The professor’s first thought was that the boy looked rugged and
sturdy, and Perry’s first thought was that there was far more
of command in his uncle’s manner than he remembered. Recalling
his father’s advice against “bluffing,” Perry was careful in his
statements as he chatted with his uncle on the way to the steamer and
consequently gave a favorable impression.
“Your father tells me you know considerable paleontology,” said the
leader of the expedition.
“I’ve always been keen on fossils,” the boy replied, “and so I’ve
managed to pick up little bits about it. But of course I haven’t
really studied; not the way I hope to, some day.”
“You know your geological periods, I suppose?”
“Backwards!” replied Perry confidently, for he knew that he really
did know them, and his friend in the Museum had taught him to see how
important was this groundwork in any fossil studies that he might do.
So, when his uncle, in a few sharp questions, put him on the rack,
Perry came out of the ordeal well, because he had only claimed to
know exactly the things he did know. As a result, he won from the
accurate and careful scientist the golden opinion:
“I shouldn’t be surprised, lad, if we made a paleontologist out of
you, after all.”
To an inland boy, such as Perry, every detail of the steamer was
of interest. Some of the members of the expedition, who had rather
dreaded the idea of a boy as a member of their party, were most
cordial to the lad when he showed himself at the same time quiet
and eager to learn. To one of the younger men, Antoine Marcq, a
Belgian scientist, Perry was especially attracted, and they chummed
up right away. Antoine told him that he had a young brother, about
Perry’s age. The Belgian proved a most delightful companion, full of
stories and with a true scientific imagination. Until the steamer
drew clear of the harbor and began to meet the bobbles of a choppy
sea, he regaled the lad with adventures from ports all over the
world, all of which, it seemed from his yarns, he had visited at
some time or other. But the afore-mentioned bobbles gave the ship a
wriggling motion of which the boy, at first slightly, then seriously,
disapproved, and for the next couple of days even Antoine’s yarns
lost their interest. It was the lad’s first sea voyage.
The first morning that he got over his sea-sickness sufficiently
to eat a hearty breakfast, which was the third day out, the lad’s
attention was attracted to a large gull which was swooping in circles
about the masthead. He pointed to it.
“What is that, Antoine?” he asked. “A booby?”
For he remembered having read somewhere about a booby having been the
name of a sea-bird and the word had stuck in his memory.
“A booby, oh no, oh no,” said Antoine, with a doubling of the
negative that was a marked characteristic in his speech, “no booby as
far north as this! It is one of the sea-gulls, a black-backed gull.”
“I thought all birds that flew over the sea were sea-gulls,” remarked
Perry.
“Not at all, not at all,” replied the other. “I show you in a
minute.” He paused. “See?” he added, pointing to a bird a little
smaller than the gull that had attracted Perry’s attention. “That is
a cousin of the ‘booby.’ It is a gannet. If you look, you can see
that his neck is longer and that his chest looks different from the
black-backed gull. That is because he has a long breastbone and the
ribs are set in at a different angle, so, when he plunges into the
water with a big splash after a fish, he does not hurt himself when
he hits the water. You can dive?”
“Oh, yes,” answered Perry, “I’m quite a decent swimmer.”
“You know that when you dive, if you hit the water ‘smack,’ it hurts?”
“You bet it does.”
“The gannet drops suddenly, and so the pointed breastbone does for
the diving bird what you do when you put your hands in front of you.
It divides the water.”
“That ought to make them good fish-catchers, I should think.”
“The very best, the very best,” agreed Antoine. “The gannet is
a relative of the cormorant, and you know the Chinese train the
cormorants to go and fish for them.”
“And bring back the fish?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I should think the cormorant would eat the fish himself.”
“No, no, he cannot. The Chinese put a ring around the bottom of his
neck so that he cannot swallow.”
“That’s a great scheme,” the boy commented. “But why doesn’t the
cormorant fly away?”
“He is trained. Why doesn’t your dog run away?”
“Training, I guess,” agreed Perry after a moment’s pause. “But a big
bird seems different, somehow. How do they train them, Antoine?”
“This way. They take the eggs of the cormorant, and set them to hatch
under a hen.”
“The ordinary hen—” interrupted the boy.
“Yes, yes, the hen. As soon as the little cormorants are big enough
to feed, they take them to a pond where there are a lot of small
fish. They tie a string to one leg of the bird. When a cormorant
catches a fish, the trainer whistles very loudly and then pulls in
the bird by the string. He takes the fish and lets him go again.
After a little time, when the bird hears the whistle, he comes back
to the boat. It is pleasanter to swim back or to fly back than to be
tugged by a string.
“When the bird is big, they take him to the sea and he catches the
fish, returning to the boat at the whistle. He cannot swallow the
fish because of the ring. At the end of the day the cormorant gets
all the fish he has caught that are not good for the market, and he
keeps on catching all the day long because he is always hungry.”
“Somebody ought to start a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Birds,” put in Perry with a grin.
“Why? It does not hurt the cormorant. He gets plenty to eat. It is
not cruelty to make a bird work, any more than to make a horse work.
But if you want to see something in Nature that is like a bully, look
there!”
The young scientist pointed over the port quarter of the steamer,
where a flock of terns was wheeling and dipping.
“What are those?” the boy queried.
“Terns,” the other answered. “Very much like gulls, only that they
are slenderer and have forked tails.”
“I don’t see anything wrong there,” continued Perry after he had
observed the merry bustle and excitement. “They seem rather jolly
little chaps.”
The other pointed a long accusing finger a little to the right of the
flock.
There, flying as straight as an arrow shot from a bow, with a steady
swift flight came a dark and resolute-looking bird. Into that flock
of terns he plunged, like a rakish pirate schooner cutting her path
amid a fleet of white-sailed pleasure boats.
In the center of the flock of birds he stopped, poised. The whirling
of the terns had become more agitated and their hoarse shrieks
betrayed their terror. Then, it seemed that the intruder had picked
out a victim, for with a sudden swirl he darted at a tern that
had wheeled up from the surface of the ocean a minute before. The
tern, light and agile, dodged and sped hither and hither, gliding,
mounting, doubling, with the dark stranger ever behind him,
apparently eager to tear him to pieces. At last, believing that the
vengeful creature behind him could not be shaken off, in one last
final effort to escape, the tern lightened his flight by disgorging
the contents of his gullet.
Instantly, with a movement so quick that Perry was hard set to follow
it, the pirate caught in midair the fish that the tern had dropped.
Pouncing upon it from above, like a falling thunderbolt, his
powerful bill seized the fish. A quick upward jerk of the head sent
the silver thing gleaming above him, and, as it whirled, he caught
it in the proper position for swallowing, head first. Then, gliding
back toward the middle of the flock, the frigatebird poised, ready to
pounce upon the meal that the next tern would catch.
“The grafter!” exclaimed Perry, when the whole plan was clear to him.
“Why doesn’t he catch fish for himself?”
“He cannot, he cannot,” Antoine answered. “He is made to live that
way. He cannot dive, no, nor can he plunge into the water. Some one
else must catch fish for him, or he will die.”
“That’s the limit!”
Antoine shrugged his shoulders.
“Man is just as bad,” he said. “The cow makes milk for the calf, Man
takes it; the bee makes honey, Man takes it; what’s the difference?”
“I suppose it’s so, when you put it that way, we do manage to sneak a
lot of stuff that animals have planned for their own little savings.
It seems a shame, somehow, and yet it seems right, too.”
“It is Nature’s law, yes,” the young Belgian replied, “always the
more powerful creature preys upon the less.”
“It’s a good thing,” said Perry, thoughtfully, “that the frigate-bird
isn’t any bigger. A five-foot span is big enough, anyway. Suppose he
were as big as an albatross, Antoine, why, the terns would never get
anything to eat at all.”
“If he were as big as an albatross,” retorted the other, “the little
birds could dodge him.”
“Isn’t the albatross about the biggest thing that ever flew?” asked
the boy.
Antoine made a gesture of negation.
“No, no,” he said, “he is the biggest bird, the biggest thing with
feathers that has ever been, but the Pteranodon—the Pteranodon was
more than half as big again and would look twice as big.”
“Pteranodon,” said the boy thoughtfully. “Let’s see, Antoine, that
was some kind of lizardbird, wasn’t it?”
“Not a bird, not a bird,” replied the other, “but it was a lizard
that flew.”
“Didn’t it have wings?”
“No, no, it had aëroplanes,” was the astonishing answer. “Hold out
your hand!”
Wondering what was coming, the boy did so.
“Double your thumb under, put the three fingers close together but
not quite touching, and spread the little finger out,” ordered his
friend.
Perry obeyed.
“Now, imagine you have claws on the three fingers, and make your
little finger four feet long. Next picture to yourself a skin like a
bat’s stretched from the tip of the finger to your feet and you have
a Pteranodon.”
“Just like a big bat!”
“No, no. The bat has five fingers. The bat’s thumb is a claw, and the
membrane that makes the wing is like a big web between the long, long
fingers. Quite different. Then the bat is a mammal. The Pteranodon,
like all the flying lizards, was a reptile. The first bat was not
born until thousands of years after the last pterodactyl or flying
lizard died. There were lots of different kinds, but all their flying
planes, or wings, were stretched from one finger. That’s the reason
of the name, Perry, ptero—dactyl, wing—finger. Some were smaller than
a sparrow, others were big. The Pteranodon was the biggest. Some had
teeth, some had beaks like birds. There was the Ramphorhyncus—”
“Oh, I know him,” said the boy eagerly, “he had a tremendous long
tail with a rudder at the tip.”
“Yes, yes,” agreed his friend. “And do you know the Dimorphodon
Macronyx?”
“Big-headed thing, looks like a nightmare, with a rat’s tail, teeth
sticking up on the outside, and eyes that look as if he’d been in a
fight? Is that the one?”
Antoine laughed at the description.
“It is not quite scientific, worded that way,” he answered, “but you
have the idea. That is ‘him,’ as you say. None of these really flew.
They aëroplaned.”
“I don’t quite understand,” said the boy. “How do you mean they
aëroplaned?”
“See,” said his friend, “a bird flaps his wings and rises. Some birds
can glide for hours and hardly ever flap their wings. But many of the
flying lizards could not flap their wings at all. They had to climb
up a tree or a cliff with their claws and then throw themselves into
space. Then, with the start they thus got, they could swoop and glide
and swirl for quite a long time. When the spurt was over, they would
have to find some new place up which to climb. Some of them, if they
were on a flat plain, would die.”
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History._
THE LARGEST CREATURE THAT EVER FLEW.
Pteranodon, the flying reptile, twenty-one feet from tip to tip of
“wings,” the last of a giant race, soaring over the Cretaceous ocean.]
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of D. Appleton & Co._
A FLYING NIGHTMARE OF OLDEN TIME.
Dimorphodon Macronyx, size of a small dog, one of the minor terrors
of the air, ten million years ago. Restoration from Seeley, in
“Dragons of the Air”; pose of restoration questionable, as fore-legs
could not be used for walking.]
“Even the Pteranodon?”
“No, no,” his friend answered. “Pteranodon was so big. From tip to
tip of the planes or wings was nearly twenty feet. And his body was
very small. Even the bones were tiny. A Pteranodon bone over two feet
long and two inches in diameter, was like a piece of heavy cardboard
rolled into a tube.”
“Hollow?”
“Quite, quite hollow. And he had very little weight to carry. We know
he could not have flapped his wings very much.”
“How can you find that out?” queried Perry. “No one was there to see
him.”
“No, no. But it takes muscle strength to flap wings, and it needs a
strong breastbone to attach the muscles. The flying lizards did not
have this. Then, too, the bones were too thin to flap such big wings.
It was nearly all gliding. So you can see why the birds were the
winners in the fight.”
“I surely do,” the boy answered. “But if the bird plan won out, and
the pterodactyl didn’t, why has the bat plan worked?”
“The bat’s wings are four times as strong as the pterodactyl’s,
because all four fingers are there,” was the reply. “Then, too, the
bat is a mammal and warm-blooded. Besides which, most bats are
small. The big bats fly slowly, flapping their wings like a crow.”
“Were there any birds to set up in competition with the flying
lizards?” asked the boy.
“Not at first,” the other said. “But when the pterodactyl failed,
Nature had to start on something else. So she tried birds. Still, the
first ones were more than half reptiles. They even had teeth.”
“Birds with teeth?”
“Great long teeth,” said his friend. “I suppose, Perry, in all the
history of fossil discoveries in the rocks, one of the greatest
events was the day when the first bird was discovered in a rock in
Bavaria which was being quarried for lithograph stone. That rock is
made from a fine kind of mud, which was laid down in the Jurassic
Period. One of the very first birds in the world had evidently got
stuck in that mud, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and although
he had struggled to get away, he was stuck fast. He had drowned and
died there.
“Then, day by day, week by week, the mud settled around him,
until finally it reached his body and his head, and entombed him
absolutely. The mud must have been coming down quite fast, for all
his body was covered even before the feathers had rotted. For years
and years, for centuries and centuries, mud had been deposited on
top of him, thousands and tens of thousands of years had put other
rock strata above the mud and then, in a later age, there had been a
rising of the earth and it was all dry land once more.
“Still more hundreds of thousands of years passed, and then Man came.
A workman, digging out stone, saw this dead bird, even the marks of
his feathers on the stone. Even then, no one could believe it was
really a bird, and the jaw, which was lying a few feet away from the
marks of the feathers, was thought to be the jaw of a fish.
“Some day, perhaps, Perry, you may be lucky enough to find one still
earlier! Think of a Triassic reptile heralding a bird! That would be
a triumph, for there must have been some small leaping dinosaur which
gave signs of bird-like development. Just think, Perry, if you should
be the one to make the grand discovery!”
“It would be great,” cried the boy.
“That’s the excitement of paleontology,” went on the other,
enthusiastically. “You’ve read of the gold-fever, and how men will
spend their lives alone in the mountains, hunting for nuggets. Then,
when they find them, the gold is just like all the rest of the gold
in the world. But when we find something new, it’s something that no
human eye has ever seen before, it’s the gateway into a new world.
Any day, if we were on an expedition among Triassic rocks, we might
find the bird that lived before the Archæopteryx and learn for the
first time exactly how the birds first came to be.”
“There aren’t any birds living to-day that are like those old
primitive ones, are there, Antoine?”
“Not really alike,” the other answered, “because those early birds
were still half reptiles. For example, the Archæopteryx had a long
tail like a lizard, with a feather on each side of each joint. Then,
too, he had claws on the joints of his wings. Now, there is still one
bird living that has claws on the end of its wings when young, and
climbs around the trees with them before it learns to fly. That’s
the—”
“Hold on!” cried Perry. “I’ll tell you the name. Wait a bit!” He
thought hard. “It’s the—the—Hoactzin, isn’t it?”
“Right, right,” said Antoine, “you have read your books well. The
first birds were not highly developed, and probably they were not as
good flyers as the flying lizards. Most likely they only took short
flights. Still, the future was theirs, for they were built upon a
better plan.”
“Because of the wing-flapping?”
“Yes, for one reason. But the pterodactyls might have developed that.
Indeed, some of the little ones may have been able to flap. It was
the cold that first gave the birds their real start.”
“The Ice Age?”
“Not the one you mean, Perry, but the second Ice Age, at the end of
the Age of Chalk. It makes the geological history of the world a
great deal easier to remember, if you divide it into the three great
Ages of Ice. The first came at the end of the Coal-Forest time or the
Carboniferous Period and closed the Empire of Fishes and Amphibians;
the Second Age of Ice came at the end of the Age of Chalk, or the
Cretaceous Period, and it closed the Empire of Reptiles; the Third
Ice Age came at the end of the Pliocene Period and it closed the
Empire of the Beasts. As the Ice-sheet of the Glacial Epoch slowly
drew back toward the North Pole, Man took his place as the leader of
Life.”
The boy looked up quickly.
“That’s a dandy division, Antoine,” he said; “it’s heaps easier to
remember that way. And you say it was the Second Ice Age that shoved
the birds ahead?”
“Yes, yes. During the Age of Chalk, nearly all Europe was under a
warm sea. There were millions of little sea-creatures with shells,
in those tepid waters. Sea-shells, you know, are made out of the
lime that is dissolved in the sea, but after that lime has been made
into a sea-shell it does not dissolve. These billions of microscopic
shellfish lived, made their homes and died, so that their shells
rained continually through the water to the ocean floor, and, inch by
inch, the accumulated shells made deep beds of lime or chalk. Some
beds are hundreds of feet thick.
“Slowly, slowly, the bed of the ocean rose, until it came near the
surface of the sea. Still it rose, throwing off the water that had
covered it. The oceans rushed into a new bed, and Western America,
Southern Europe and Southern Asia rose above the water for the last
time, much in their present outlines.
“The changes of the earth’s crust made numberless volcanoes,
especially in those parts of the earth that had just appeared above
the surface. In the glare of eruptions that never stopped, amid the
thunder of vast explosions, the hissing of great geysers and the
unceasing growl of earthquakes, the land grew higher and higher above
the sea, and the world grew colder and colder. It was the end of the
Empire of Reptiles.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Perry, remembering his dream.
“As the world grew colder,” Antoine continued, “the soft vegetation
died away and harder grasses and trees and shrubs took its place,
needing creatures with better teeth to chew the stronger fibers. And
still the grip of the cold increased.
“In that time of miserable frigidity, the flying lizards suffered
terribly. Their thin wings of membrane had no resistance to the
biting blasts that whistled over the ever-rising land. Their cold
blood afforded no store of vitality against the frost.
“The birds, their rivals, protected with feathers, with warm blood
in their veins, with deep breastbones giving them muscles enabling
them to fly long distances, got the pick of the food. One by one the
shivering pterodactyls disappeared, and perhaps the great specimen
of Pteranodon in our Museum was the very last of the giant flying
reptiles.
“We can almost see him, half-starved, half-frozen, gliding over the
waters of the sea, his gaunt ungainly frame growing weaker and more
feeble as numbness stole over him, only, at last, to fall into the
ocean that once flowed over what is now the State of Kansas. And so
he died, the great Pteranodon, the last of his kind, and, for size,
the crested monarch of all that flew in any age that had been or was
to come.”