on the top of this bleak chalk down, where i am wandering on a dull afternoon, i light upon the blanched skeleton of a crow, which i need not fear to handle, as its bones have been first picked clean by carrion birds, and then finally purified by hungry ants, time, and stormy weather. i pick a piece of it up in my hands, and find that i have got hold of its clumped tail-bone. a strange fragment truly, with a strange history, which i may well spell out as i sit to rest a minute upon the neighbouring stile. for this dry tail-bone consists, as i can see at a glance, of several separate vertebr?, all firmly welded together into a single piece. they must once upon a time have been real disconnected jointed vertebr?, like those of the dog's or lizard's tail; and the way in which they have become fixed fast into a solid mass sheds a world of light upon the true nature and origin of birds, as well as upon many analogous cases elsewhere.
when i say that these bones were once separate, i am indulging in no mere hypothetical darwinian speculation. i refer, not to the race, but to the particular crow in person. these very pieces themselves, in their embryonic condition, were as distinct as the individual bones of the bird's neck or of our own spines. if you were to examine the chick in the egg you would find them quite divided. but as the young crow grows more and more into the typical bird-pattern, this lizard-like peculiarity fades away, and the separate pieces unite by 'anastomosis' into a single 'coccygean bone,' as the osteologists call it. in all our modern birds, as in this crow, the vertebr? composing the tail-bone are few in number, and are soldered together immovably in the adult form. it was not always so, however, with ancestral birds. the earliest known member of the class—the famous fossil bird of the solenhofen lithographic stone—retained throughout its whole life a long flexible tail, composed of twenty unwelded vertebr?, each of which bore a single pair of quill-feathers, the predecessors of our modern pigeon's train. there are many other marked reptilian peculiarities in this primitive oolitic bird; and it apparently possessed true teeth in its jaws, as its later cretaceous kinsmen discovered by professor marsh undoubtedly did. when we compare side by side those real flying dragons, the pterodactyls, together with the very birdlike deinosaurians, on the one hand, and these early toothed and lizard-tailed birds on the other, we can have no reasonable doubt in deciding that our own sparrows and swallows are the remote feathered descendants of an original reptilian or half-reptilian ancestor.
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 a?rial 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. as early as the time when our chalk was deposited, the bird's tail had become what it is at the present day—a single united bone, consisting of a few scarcely distinguishable crowded rings. this is the form it assumes in the toothed fossil birds of western america. but, as if to preserve the memory of their reptilian origin, birds in their embryo stage still go on producing separate caudal vertebr?, only to unite them together at a later point of their development into the typical coccygean bone.
much the same sort of process has taken place in the higher apes, and, as mr. darwin would assure us, in man himself. there the long prehensile tail of the monkeys has grown gradually shorter, and, being at last coiled up under the haunches, has finally degenerated into an insignificant and wholly embedded terminal joint. but, indeed, we can find traces of a similar adaptation to circumstances everywhere. take, for instance, the common english amphibians. the newt passes all its life in the water, and therefore always retains its serviceable tail as a swimming organ. the frog in its tadpole state is also aquatic, and it swims wholly by means of its broad and flat rudder-like appendage. but as its legs bud out and it begins to fit itself for a terrestrial existence, the tail undergoes a rapid atrophy, and finally fades away altogether. to a hopping frog on land, such a long train would be a useless drag, while in the water its webbed feet and muscular legs make a satisfactory substitute for the lost organ. last of all, the tree-frog, leading a specially terrestrial life, has no tadpole at all, but emerges from the egg in the full frog-like shape. as he never lives in the water, he never feels the need of a tail.
the edible crab and lobster show us an exactly parallel case amongst crustaceans. everybody has noticed that a crab's body is practically identical with a lobster's, only that in the crab the body-segments are broad and compact, while the tail, so conspicuous in its kinsman, is here relatively small and tucked away unobtrusively behind the legs. this difference in construction depends entirely upon the habits and manners of the two races. the lobster lives among rocks and ledges; he uses his small legs but little for locomotion, but he springs surprisingly fast and far through the water by a single effort of his powerful muscular tail. as to his big fore-claws, those, we all know, are organs of prehension and weapons of offence, not pieces of locomotive mechanism. hence the edible and muscular part of a lobster is chiefly to be found in the claws and tail, the latter having naturally the firmest and strongest flesh. the crab, on the other hand, lives on the sandy bottom, and walks about on its lesser legs, instead of swimming or darting through the water by blows of its tail, like the lobster or the still more active prawn and shrimp. hence the crab's tail has dwindled away to a mere useless historical relic, while the most important muscles in its body are those seated in the network of shell just above its locomotive legs. in this case, again, it is clear that the appendage has disappeared because the owner had no further use for it. indeed, if one looks through all nature, one will find the philosophy of tails eminently simple and utilitarian. those animals that need them evolve them; those animals that do not need them never develop them; and those animals that have once had them, but no longer use them for practical purposes, retain a mere shrivelled rudiment as a lingering reminiscence of their original habits.
