303 



Few indeed of the supposed ornitholites of modern writers can support 

 their claim to this distinction, when subjected to a careful examination. 

 Thus the birds' beaks from Jena and Weimar, mentioned by Wallerius 

 and Linnaeus, are substances which, according to Walch, merely bear 

 an external resemblance to these bodies. 



But when it is recollected, that plants of the family of ferns, of mi- 

 mosa, and of other terrestrial plants, are found in the same stones with 

 the fossil fish at Vestena Nova, GEningen, Pappenheim, and Roche- 

 sauve, no doubt can exist, that at the period when these fishes existed in 

 the ocean, the whole surface of the globe could not be covered with 

 water, but there were parts of the earth in which the riches of vegetation 

 were displayed. Ann. du Mus. T. in. p. 19. 



That a part of the surface of the earth was not then covered by water 

 is also rendered highly probable, by the rareness with which the fossil 

 remains of birds have been met with. So seldom, indeed, have such 

 fossils been seen, that their existence has been doubted, I believe I may 

 assert, by the greater number of oryctologists. Passing the erroneous 

 accounts of the earlier writers on this subject, who appear to have con- 

 sidered different incrustations arid figured stones as real fossil remains of 

 birds, we have had the figure of a supposed ornitholite given in one of 

 the numbers of the Journal de Physique, and the original specimen having 

 been examined by M. P. Camper and the Abbe Fortis, neither of them 

 would admit its supposed origin. An engraving was also given, in the 

 same work, Thermidor, An. 8, of a stone, with the impression of the 

 two legs of a bird ; but it is said, that no one at Paris has seen the original 

 specimen. 



In the same work, however, an indubitable ornitholite, the foot of a 

 bird, incrusted in the gypsum from the quarries of Clignancourt, near 

 Montmartre, is figured and described by Cuvier, showing that real orni- 

 tholites exist in the ancient beds of gypsous matter. Blumenbach men- 

 tions the discovery of the bones of a water-fowl in the marly schist of 



