Following the key further, he draws more conclusions. The tracks are not in pairs, so the bird does not belong to the perchers; therefore it must be a wader or a swimmer. There are no web-marks to indicate the latter; hence it is a three-toed walking or wading bird. It had flat, long, narrow, and pointed wings because it came gliding swiftly and low, and scraped the sand before its wings were closed. This is shown by the few scratches before the prints became perfect. A certain class of birds thus arrests the impetus of flight. It had a long feeling-bill, as shown by the little holes in the sands where the marks became entangled; and so on. These combined characteristics belong to one class of birds and to no other; so he knows as definitely as [pg005] though he had seen the bird that a sandpiper alighted here for a brief period, for here is his signature.
It is plain that tracks in the sand mean as much to the naturalist as do tracks in the snow to the hunter, and trails on the land to the Indian who follows his course by signs not seen by an untrained eye.
The tide effaces much that is written by foot and wing, but sometimes such signs are preserved and become veritable "footprints on the sands of time." In the Museum of Natural History in New York is a fossil slab, taken from the Triassic sandstone, showing the footprints of a dinosaurian reptile now extinct, which, in that long ago, walked across a beach--an event unimportant enough in itself, but more marvelous than any tale of imagination when recorded for future ages. From such tracks, together with fragments of skeletons, the dinosaur has been made to live again, and its form and structure have been as clearly defined as those of the little sandpiper of Dr. Coues.
It has been said that everything on the land has its counterpart in the sea. But all land animals are separate and independent individuals, while many of those of the sea are united into organic associations comprising millions of individuals inseparably connected and many of them interdependent, such as corals, hydroids, etc. These curious communities can be compared only to the vegetation of the land, which many of them resemble in outer form. Other stationary animals, such as oysters and barnacles, which also depend upon floating organisms for their food, have no parallel on the land.