. The story of hedgerow and pond . The water-lilies, with large floatingleaves and big white or yellow flowers,are the most beautiful of all the pondplants, and make a splendid ornament tomany a beautiful piece of water. Moor-hens and dabchicks, wagtails anddragon-flies love to play about the leavesand sport in the bright sunshine. Butlong before any of these present-dayplants made their appearance, manychanges had to be gone through. Notonly has the distribution of sea and landbeen greatly altered, but the climateitself has gone through change afterchanofe. And other forms of life—suchas the
. The story of hedgerow and pond . The water-lilies, with large floatingleaves and big white or yellow flowers,are the most beautiful of all the pondplants, and make a splendid ornament tomany a beautiful piece of water. Moor-hens and dabchicks, wagtails anddragon-flies love to play about the leavesand sport in the bright sunshine. Butlong before any of these present-dayplants made their appearance, manychanges had to be gone through. Notonly has the distribution of sea and landbeen greatly altered, but the climateitself has gone through change afterchanofe. And other forms of life—suchas the strange and terrible reptiles,which swam in the early seas and evenflew about in the air on huge wings,bigger by far than any of the largestbirds now living, had their time on the. Pond Life earth and died out, leaving their bonespreserved in the rocks to tell us whatsort of monsters lived in those days oflong ago. Strange as it may seem, the birdsappear to be descended from some ofthese reptiles. There isnt much like-ness, at first sight, between a reptileand a bird of the present day ; but fromthe remains of the earliest known bird,and from certain peculiarities of itsbones, it is agreed amongst the scientificpeople who have worked at this sortof thing, that the present birds originallysprung fi-om some form of reptile. Curious things they must have been,these early birds, for we know from thefossil skeletons which have been foundthat they had teeth in their jaws, andfurther, they had a long tail with many K 129 Pond Life joints, like the tail of a lizard, only thateach of these joints had a pair of feathersattached to it. Hampered as they musthave been with these long, unwieldytails, their power of flight was most likelyvery feeble in comparison with that ofm
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectbirds, booksubjectwat
