The ancestry of birds
Collection
Résumé
Seated on the dry hill-side here, by the belted blue Mediterranean, I have picked up from the ground a bit of blanched and moldering bone, well cleaned to my hand by the unconscious friendliness of the busy ants; and looking closely at it I recognize it at once, with a sympathetic sigh, for the solid welded tail-piece of some departed British tourist swallow. He came here like ourselves, no doubt, to escape the terrors of an English winter: but among these pine-clad Provençal summits some nameless calamity overtook him, from greedy kestrel or from native sportsman, and left him here, a sheer hulk, for the future contemplation of a wandering and lazy field-naturalist. Fit text, truly, for a sermon on the ancestry of birds; for this solid tail-bone of his tells more strangely than any other part of his whole anatomy the curious story of his evolution from some primitive lizard-like progenitor. Close by here, among the dry rosemary and large-leaved cistus by my side, a few weathered tips of naked basking limestone are peeping thirstily through the arid soil; and on one of these gray lichen-covered masses a motionless gray lizard sits sunning his limbs, in hue and spots just like the lichen itself, so that none but a sharp eye could detect his presence, or distinguish his little curling body from the jutting angles of the rock, to which it adapts itself with such marvelous accuracy.
Caractéristiques techniques
NUMERIQUE | |
Éditeur(s) | Human And Literature Publishing |
Auteur(s) | Collection |
Parution | 26/04/2022 |
Contenu |
ePub + Mobi/Kindle |
EAN13 |
9782384690862 |
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