The Ancestry of Birds
EAN13
9782384690862
Éditeur
Human and Literature Publishing
Date de publication
Langue
anglais
Fiches UNIMARC
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The Ancestry of Birds

Human and Literature Publishing

Livre numérique

  • Aide EAN13 : 9782384690862
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    3.49
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.
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