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. 
Archzxopteryx 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 Archeopteryx 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 
