CHAPTER IIIPIRATES 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. SoPerry 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 foryourself 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 youto 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 tropicaloutfit 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 scientificwork 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, forhe 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 portsall 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, hispowerful 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 Belgianreplied, “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, “hehad 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 isa 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. Themud 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 ofthe 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 readyour 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 theearth 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.”