Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/812

 with their talons. Their sight is wonderful, enabling them to discover their quarry at a great distance, and to strike it without error, not-withstanding the velocity of their approach. The sense of smell would seem remarkably developed in certain carrion-eating birds. The secretary-bird kills the poisonous serpents which are its diet by kicking them, while our domestic fowls scratch for a living.



In variety of prehensile means mammals far surpass any equal group of the animal kingdom. Owing to our familiarity, however, these peculiarities seem less interesting; but, if we could divest ourselves of preknowledge, or see them with a new vision, we should be astonished and delighted by the various contrivances and the curious adaptations. The tongue is the chief or only prehensile organ of many animals. Here belong the ox and all the cud-chewers. Of these the giraffe is the strangest. Intended to browse, it has an extremely long neck, mounted on equally long legs and shoulder-blades; yet, lest it should still fail of reaching its dinner, the tongue is proportionately long and remarkably prehensile; being able to select the sweetest foliage, or extend so slenderly at the tip as to enter a hole the size of a quill. Its lingual dexterity is sometimes exercised to the discomfiture of visitors at the menagerie. The toothless ant-eater breaks down the hard mounds of the ants or termites with its powerful claws, and sweeps the insects into its mouth with an immensely long, worm-like tongue; or it may thrust the tongue directly into the ant-holes. The insects adhere by means of a glutinous saliva, as in the case of the toad.

The hog uses his nose for getting food, and the star-nosed mole has a similar contrivance. The lips are employed by the horse; and we find both nose and upper lip prolonged as a proboscis in the tapir and shrew. But the elephant is, of course, the great example of immense proboscis. The whole makeup of the animal is queer, and to a stranger would be absurd. The small boy who described the elephant as "a large beast with a tail at both ends" had the elements of a naturalist. As the neck of the huge creature does not permit great motion of the head, the trunk supplies the deficiency. The tusks are also chiefly food-gatherers; used as picks and spades for uprooting trees and digging succulent roots. The tusks of the walrus are certainly locomotive and defensive organs, but it is suggested that perhaps they are also used to raise algæ from the rocks of the sea-bottom.

The greater number of mammals depend wholly upon the jaws