128 Chronicles of Science. [Jan. 
as faithful a representation as it is in an artist’s power to attain. But 
neither Mr. Dinkel nor any cther artist can free himself from a bias 
of ideas. The hand will follow the mind, and given the notion of a 
fish’s head, the pencil will involuntarily portray the resemblance in 
figuring the object to which the resemblance is assigned. When 
Professor Owen first described the Pappenheim specimen, he made no 
mention of what has since been described by Mr. Mackie as the brain 
or cast of the cerebral cavity of the skull, nor of certain osseous relics 
which in the present publication are referred to as a “ premaxillary 
bone, and its impression resembling that of a fossil fish.” And yet 
these objects are perhaps among, if not actually, the most important 
of all the fossilized remains. The nodule representing the brain, it is 
admitted by the Professor, may be, as suggested by Mr. Evans, “ part 
of the cranium with the cast of the brain of the Archzopteryx ;” but 
of the so-called fish-head he makes no other remark than the quotation 
above, “resembling that of a fossil fish.” Nor do we blame his reti- 
cence. Every word Professor Owen says carries weight, and the last- 
mentioned object is certainly in so obscure a state that no one, without 
further illustrative fossils, could by any possibility determine what it 
is. It would be discordant with all our present knowledge to find a 
bird’s beak containing teeth in sockets, yet that would not be more 
extraordinary nor more out of all comparisons with living things than 
a long tail such as the Archeopteryx undoubtedly possesses. Yet 
such a toothed bill may be possible. After many days’ careful study 
and comparison we could not convince ourselves that this object was a 
fish’s jaw, nor could we find evidence enough to assert that it was a 
bird’s beak with teeth; but it certainly has, as it lies in the slab, as 
much likeness to a beak as to a premaxillary, and as there is not a 
fish-scale nor a fish-bone in the whole slab, nor in its counterpart, nor 
a speck nor portion of a fish in either, it is as possible for this object 
to belong to the Archzopteryx as to any other creature. 
The general ornithic nature of the fossil is, as we have already 
said, indisputable, but not so positive do we think can anyone be as 
to its exceptional characters. If the Archeopteryx had in its long 
vertebrate tail, one character so exceptional as not to be matched by 
any existing or any other fossil bird, it may have had other characters 
as exceptional ; and although we should say that no bird that preened 
its feathers would have teeth, yet the beak of a bird is but a modi- 
fied mammalian jaw, just as the whole structure of birds is a 
modification of the mammalian type; so it is not without the bounds of 
possibility that a bird’s jaw may be in such a state of development as 
to retain some traces of teeth. Nor can we be certain, it seems to us, 
that there are no reptilian affinities, or, at least, resemblances in the 
structure of the wings. Had the manus of Archzeopteryx been adapted 
for the support of a membranous wing, the extent to which the 
skeleton is preserved, and the ordinary condition of the fossil Ptero- 
sauria in the lithographic stone, render it almost certain, as Professor 
Owen properly observes, that some of these most characteristic long 
slender bones of the pterosaurian wing-fingers would have been visible 
