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 little 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. 



Archseopteryx 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 fan, and that the tail opens and 

 shuts like a fan. But in Archasopteryx 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 



