This question leads to another. Why did that giant razor-bill known as the great auk become flightless? It would seem that its wings somehow failed to keep pace with the growth of its body, so that while they remained sufficient for flight under water, they became useless for flight in the air. Its failure in this led to its extinction, for it was unable to escape from its arch-enemy man. When the old-time sailors, somewhere about one hundred years ago, discovered its haunts in Iceland could be profitably invaded for the purpose of collecting feathers, and bait, they speedily wiped out the race; for being flightless they were unable to escape the marauders once they had effected a landing. Unhappily there was no Bird Protection Society in those days, to stop this senseless slaughter.
Here our survey of Birds on the Wing ends. It began with flight through the air, it ends with flight through the water. It is not a little surprising, surely, to find that the same wing can be efficiently used for both these extremes of motion. And still more surprising to find that, this being so, the penguin should have been forced, so to speak, to adopt the expedient of evolving a paddle; and so forego the power of aerial locomotion. The skeleton of this wing, it was pointed out, differed in no essential from that of the typical avian wing. In some points, however, it has changed conspicuously. For the bones have become greatly flattened, and the several parts of the wing—arm, fore-arm, and hand—can no longer be bent upon one another in the Z-shaped fashion of normal wings, while the “quill” or “flight-feathers” have been reduced to so small a size that they are unrecognizable.
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Transcriber’s Note
All obvious typos were corrected and hyphenization was standardized. The italic labels on the illustration facing page 102 were standardized to match the other illustration’s text. Illustrations were repositioned so that paragraphs were not split.