“By the very nature of the theory _each stage_ in all these millions is an advantage over the last towards survival! The thing has only to be stated for its absurdity to appear. Compare the ‘get away’ chances of a lizard at one end of the process or a sparrow at the other with some poor beast that had to try and scurry off on half-wings! or to fly with half-legs! “Postulate a design, say, ‘Here was something in the making,’ and the process is explicable, especially if fairly rapid so as to bridge over the dangerously weak stage of imperfection. Postulate Natural Selection and it is manifestly impossible.” Let us note a few things of which Mr. Belloc shows himself to be unaware in this amusing display of perplexity. In the first place he does not know that the Mesozoic reptiles most closely resembling birds were creatures walking on their hind-legs, with a bony structure of the loins and a backbone already suggestive of the avian anatomy. Nor is he aware that in the lowliest of living birds the fore-limbs are mere flappers, that the feathers are simpler in structure than any other bird’s feathers, and that the general development of a bird’s feather points plainly to the elongation of a scale. He has never learnt that feathers came before wings, and that at first they had to do, not with flying, but with protection against cold. Yet all this was under his nose in the _Outline of History_ in text and picture. The transition from a quilled to a feathered dinosaur presents indeed no imaginative difficulties, and the earliest birds ran and did not fly. One of the earliest known extinct birds is _Hesperornis_, a wingless diving bird. It is figured on page 30, and there is another bird on page 34 that Mr. Belloc might ponder with advantage. A whole great section of living birds, like the ostrich and the emu, have no trace in their structure of any ancestral flying phase; their breast-bones are incapable of carrying the necessary muscular attachments. [Illustration: H. G. Wells. Low] But after the feather was fully developed it opened up great possibilities of a strong and light extension of the flapper, helpful in running or useful in leaps from tree to tree. _Archæopteryx_, another early bird, which is also figured in the _Outline_, has a sort of bat-wing fore-limb with feathers instead of membrane. It was a woodland creature, and flew as a flying fox or a flying lemur or even a bat flies. All these facts are widely known, and all that trouble about the half-leg, half-wing, dissolves before them. But consider what a hash they make of Mr. Belloc’s argument, and how pitifully it scurries off before them on its nondescript stumps of pretentious half-knowledge, half-impudence! So much for zero the second. TROUBLES OF MR. BELLOC AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT