NOTES ON PALEOPATHOLOGY. 



683 



about on the water during the day, and feed along the shore or in 

 the marshes at night, always holding the wing well up until the 

 fracture unites. The case is different with land birds, where, in 

 getting about, the seat of the break is 

 often violently disturbed. 



This interesting fossil specimen, then, 

 goes to prove that the union of fractures 

 of the shafts of the long bones in the 

 vertebrata during the later Tertiary 

 times was identical with what now oc- 

 curs in the case of existing forms. Such 

 a thing would be most naturally sus- 

 pected, but, as with some of the simpler, 

 self-evident theorems in geometry, it is 

 invariably required that the proof be 

 forthcoming. It is quite another thing 

 to conjecture hoiv this fracture came 

 about. If I be right in my guess that 

 the specimen was a bird, and that bird 

 was a goose, why, it may have been done 

 in battle with one of its own kind ; it 

 may have been done by a blow from a 

 bird of prey, which afterward failed to 

 secure the quarry.* 



Such evidence as I possess upon the 

 first-mentioned supposition is by no 

 means to be implicitly relied upon ; and 

 in the case of the second supposition 

 such a circumstance as is pointed at 

 would certainly be one of the rarest oc- 

 currence. 



The bone could much more easily 

 have been broken by haviug been struck 

 by an arrow by its flint-pointed head, 

 provided it were shot with sufficient 

 strength from a bow. Of the probabil- 

 ity of that I leave the reader to judge 

 for himself; there is some evidence to 

 sustain such a conjecture, no inconsid- 

 erable part of which has been presented 

 above, and more can easily be found 

 between the lines. 



I pass now to the consideration of 

 one other pathological condition pre- 



a, 



Fig. 2. — Left Carpo-metacakpus 

 from the Hand of an Extinct 

 Swan (Olor paloregonue) from 

 Oregon. Outer aspect and 

 natural size from the specimen 

 by the author. </, the seat of 

 the disease on the summit ot 

 the first metacarpal. 



* In the collection I discovered the remains of two new species of extinct eagles. 



