The Evolutionist at Large. Allen Grant
creature through its novel domain. Accordingly, the bones soon grew fewer in number and shorter in length, while the feathers simultaneously arranged themselves side by side upon the terminal hump. As early as the time when our chalk was deposited, the bird's tail had become what it is at the present day—a single united bone, consisting of a few scarcely distinguishable crowded rings. This is the form it assumes in the toothed fossil birds of Western America. But, as if to preserve the memory of their reptilian origin, birds in their embryo stage still go on producing separate caudal vertebræ, only to unite them together at a later point of their development into the typical coccygean bone.
Much the same sort of process has taken place in the higher apes, and, as Mr. Darwin would assure us, in man himself. There the long prehensile tail of the monkeys has grown gradually shorter, and, being at last coiled up under the haunches, has finally degenerated into an insignificant and wholly embedded terminal joint. But, indeed, we can find traces of a similar adaptation to circumstances everywhere. Take, for instance, the common English amphibians. The newt passes all its life in the water, and therefore always retains its serviceable tail as a swimming organ. The frog in its tadpole state is also aquatic, and it swims wholly by means of its broad and flat rudder-like appendage. But as its legs bud out and it begins to fit itself for a terrestrial existence, the tail undergoes a rapid atrophy, and finally fades away altogether. To a hopping frog on land, such a long train would be a useless drag, while in the water its webbed feet and muscular legs make a satisfactory substitute for the lost organ. Last of all, the tree-frog, leading a specially terrestrial life, has no tadpole at all, but emerges from the egg in the full frog-like shape. As he never lives in the water, he never feels the need of a tail.
The edible crab and lobster show us an exactly parallel case amongst crustaceans. Everybody has noticed that a crab's body is practically identical with a lobster's, only that in the crab the body-segments are broad and compact, while the tail, so conspicuous in its kinsman, is here relatively small and tucked away unobtrusively behind the legs. This difference in construction depends entirely upon the habits and manners of the two races. The lobster lives among rocks and ledges; he uses his small legs but little for locomotion, but he springs surprisingly fast and far through the water by a single effort of his powerful muscular tail. As to his big fore-claws, those, we all know, are organs of prehension and weapons of offence, not pieces of locomotive mechanism. Hence the edible and muscular part of a lobster is chiefly to be found in the claws and tail, the latter having naturally the firmest and strongest flesh. The crab, on the other hand, lives on the sandy bottom, and walks about on its lesser legs, instead of swimming or darting through the water by blows of its tail, like the lobster or the still more active prawn and shrimp. Hence the crab's tail has dwindled away to a mere useless historical relic, while the most important muscles in its body are those seated in the network of shell just above its locomotive legs. In this case, again, it is clear that the appendage has disappeared because the owner had no further use for it. Indeed, if one looks through all nature, one will find the philosophy of tails eminently simple and utilitarian. Those animals that need them evolve them; those animals that do not need them never develop them; and those animals that have once had them, but no longer use them for practical purposes, retain a mere shrivelled rudiment as a lingering reminiscence of their original habits.
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