The first frog who crosses your path can tell you
all about the pleasures of the double existence of the amphibian.
Once outside of the water, these animals gradually adapted
themselves more and more to life on land. Some became reptiles
(creatures who crawl like lizards) and they shared the
silence of the forests with the insects. That they might move
faster through the soft soil, they improved upon their legs
and their size increased until the world was populated with
gigantic forms (which the hand-books of biology list under
the names of Ichthyosaurus and Megalosaurus and Brontosaurus)
who grew to be thirty to forty feet long and who could have
played with elephants as a full grown cat plays with her kittens.
Some of the members of this reptilian family began to live in
the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred
feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose
of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from
branch to branch. And so they changed a part of their skin
into a sort of parachute, which stretched between the sides of
their bodies and the small toes of their fore-feet, and gradually
they covered this skinny parachute with feathers and made
their tails into a steering gear and flew from tree to tree and
developed into true birds.
Then a strange thing happened. All the gigantic reptiles
died within a short time.
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