BIRDS OF OLD 77 



by his foot, so the bird was made evident by 

 the feather whose discovery was announced 

 August 15, 1861. And a httle later, in Sep- 

 tember of the same year, the bird itself turned 

 up, and in 1877 a second specimen was found, 

 the two representing two species, if not two 

 distinct genera. These were very different 

 from any birds now living — so different, indeed, 

 and bearing such evident traces of their reptil- 

 ian ancestry, that it is necessary to place them 

 apart from other animals in a separate division 

 of the class birds. 



Archa^opteryx was considerably smaller than 

 a crow, with a stout little head armed with 

 sharp teeth (as scarce as hens' teeth was no 

 joke in that distant period), while as he flut- 

 tered through the air he trailed after him a tail 

 longer than his body, beset with feathers on 

 either side. Everyone knows that nowadays 

 the feathers of a bird's tail are arranged like 

 the sticks of a ffin, and that the tail opens and 

 shuts like a fan. But in Archseopteryx the 

 feathers were arranged in pairs, a feather on 

 each side of every joint of the tail, so that on a 

 small scale the tail was something like that of 



