Still more remarkable adaptations for the care of the young appear among the birds. Here the eggs are not to be deserted, but are to be cared for until the young appear. These again must have attention until such time as they are quite able to take care of themselves. The birds are warm-blooded animals, and even their young, while they are developing in the egg, are warm-blooded. Consequently the temperature of the egg must be maintained evenly and uniformly, or there will be no development.
The fish may drop its eggs carelessly upon the bottom of the stream. A frog may deposit them in a mass of jelly and leave them forever. A turtle may bury its eggs in a sand bank and abandon them to their fate. The warm blood of the young bird demands more attention than this. Accordingly, the parent bird has learned to make for itself some sort of nest, in which the young may be kept properly warm until they are developed. The ancestral bird, who was to be the progenitor of the entire bird class, must have had some very simple method of providing a place in which its eggs might be hatched. As the descendants of this original bird have passed into new situations, the various lines have taken upon themselves different shapes until we have the multiform birds of to-day. The habits of the birds have also varied. Each has adapted itself to the situation in which it found itself, and no adaptation has been more varied and effective than the adjustment of the nesting site. Nests are found upon the ground, in the bushes, on the lower limbs, in the crotches of the trees, in the trunks of the trees, upon their very summits, and on the tops of inaccessible crags. To every sort of situation some bird has been enabled to adapt itself. This has made it possible for very many more birds to thrive than could have found a place in the world, had they all lived upon the same plan.
In the case of the bank swallow his nest may be a very simple contrivance, consisting only of a tunnel running back into a bank, and widening at the back. Some material that will soften the bed upon which eggs are to be laid must be placed in this cavity. The whole home is a very simple and crude affair. But little better is the arrangement which the woodpecker calls a home. This has been cut into the dry wood of a defective tree. No woodpecker can make his home in absolutely solid sapwood. Hence the first labor of the woodpecker must consist in finding a place in which it can dig. If there is an old stump of a limb sticking up, the problem is readily solved. Such wood has no sap in it, and is brittle enough to be easily dug out. But, if there be no such stub, the woodpecker will find a suitable place in most trees. At some time or other almost every tree loses a big limb. When such accident occurs there will always be in the old trunk a region through which sap once went to this limb. This region, deprived of its function, goes completely dry, like the heartwood of the tree, and it is into such material as this that the woodpecker succeeds in drilling his well-protected home.
As birds rise higher in the scale the nest-building becomes a more complicated affair, and after a while we find a well-woven substantial nest, through which even the air will not chill the eggs enough to prevent their hatching, while the warmth is supplied by the mother's body. It is often a matter of surprise to many people that a bird should contrive to build a nest so exquisitely circular. The trick, after all, is not quite so difficult as it looks. The robin gathers up a few sticks and places them as the beginning of the platform. More and more are brought and woven into each other, making a framework altogether too big for the nest. Then mud is brought and plastered inside of this. With the plastering of this mud the careful circularity of the work begins. Every time a little material has been added the robin sits down in the nest and revolves her body, in this way shaping the interior much as the potter shapes a pot. In the case of the artisan, it is the pot that revolves. In the case of the robin, the bird itself revolves. The effect is the same in both cases—a circular vessel is produced. A little lining added to the interior of the nest softens it for the reception of the eggs. In this exquisite home the robin lays her eggs, and sits upon them until they are developed enough to hatch, and then feeds the young until they are old enough to feed themselves.
Far more remarkable than any of the devices thus far described are the wonderful developments which have come in the class of animals known as the mammals. Here the most wonderful protection is made for the care and feeding of the young. But this is to be the subject of a separate chapter.
As long as we thought of each sort of animal as being a separate species shaped in the beginning by the hands of the Creator, each of these devices seemed to us a new manifestation of the Divine Providence, whose fertile planning had conceived so many methods of providing for his children. Unconsciously we thought of God acting as man acted. Each animal seemed a purely separate invention purposely designed for an especial place. Now we understand the plan in creation better, and see that each animal has come from another not quite like itself, some distance back, and this from still another. Our admiration for these devices as they arise through evolution is no less, but takes on another form.
CHAPTER VI
Life in the Past
Anyone who earnestly studies plants and animals as they exist in the world to-day cannot help wondering how the earth began and where it got its life. This is the true end and aim of geological study. The history of man seems to run back into a far distant and gloomy past. Except for the poetical account in Genesis and the traditions of various peoples throughout the world, real history fades away into an earlier time of which there are no written records. When the delvers in the Mesopotamian plain talk to us of kingdoms running back through seven or eight or nine thousand years, we seem to be getting back to the beginnings of things. But seven or eight or nine thousand years are as nothing in comparison with the age of the earth, which runs back into a past so limitless that no man can safely assign any set figure to it. In a recent paper, Dr. Walcott, of the Smithsonian Institution, says that the antiquity of the earth must be measured not in millions, for they are too short, nor hundreds of millions, for this carries us too far, but must surely be measured in tens of millions of years.