BIRD-LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
THE BIRD : ITS PLACE IN NATURE AND RELATION TO MAN.
The Bird's Place in Nature.[1]—About thirteen
thousand species of birds are known to science. The
structure of many of these has been carefully studied,
and all have been classified, at least provisionally.
Taken as a whole, the class Aves, in which all birds are
placed, is more clearly defined than any other group of
the higher animals. That is, the most unlike birds are
more closely allied than are the extremes among mammals,
fishes, or reptiles, and all living birds possess the
distinctive characters of their class.
When compared with other animals, birds are found to occupy second place in the scale of life. They stand between mammals and reptiles, and are more closely related to the latter than to the former. In fact, certain extinct birds so clearly connect living birds with rep- tiles, that these two classes are sometimes placed in one
group—the Sauropsida.
- ↑ On the structure of birds read Coues's Key to North American Birds, Part II (Estes & Lauriat); Headley, The Structure and Life of Birds ; Newton's Dictionary of Birds—articles, Anatomy of Birds and Fossil Birds ; Martin and Moale's Handbook of Vertebrate Dissection, Part II, How to Dissect a Bird ; Shufeldt's Myology of the Raven (Macmiilan Co.).
