170 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
swimmers as well as flyers, some of them with 
jaws full of powerful teeth. It is.in this period 
that nature has made indelible sketches on the 
rocks, lithographic studies of her great future 
work, so to speak; work that man is now so 
recklessly destroying forever. In England 
the eocene has furnished a hint of the king- 
fishers and the heron family. In France most 
interesting discoveries have been made in the 
Paris basin, and in formations of the same 
horizon. Fossil feathers, fragmentary skele- 
tons, and even eggs, have been found, the last 
mentioned in the marl deposits near Aix in 
Provence. From lacustral beds in Auvergne 
and Bourbonnais a great number of birds have 
come to light, nearly fifty distinct species hav- 
ing been described. The marl of Ronzon has 
given up an ancient plover, a gull, and a fla- 
mingo, very different from presently existing 
species. 
Coming to our own country we step at once 
amongst the choicest records of the rocks. 
Beginning with the Jurassic formation, we find 
in the upper beds of the period in Wyoming 
the remains of a bird somewhat larger than 
our well-known great blue heron (Ardea hera- 
dias). It was probably a toothed bird, but re- 
sembled the Aaztfe in other respects, and was, 
perhaps, not a flyer. 
The cretaceous birds of America all appear 
to be aquatic, and comprise some eight or a 
dozen genera, and many species. Professor 
Marsh and others have found in Kansas a 
large number of most interesting fossil birds, 
one of them, a gigantic loon-like creature. six 
feet in length from beak to toe, taken from the 
yellow chalk of the Smoky-Hill river region 
