41 8 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



work in this direction has been supplemented by the more 

 recent monographs of H. G. Seeley. In 1880, Cope 

 described several representatives of Theromorpha from the 

 Permian deposits of Texas, and E. T. Newton has recently 

 made known some remarkable genera of Anomodontia from 

 the Triassic Sandstones of Elgin in Scotland. 



Birds. Cuvier gave an account of the few remains of fossil 

 birds that were known in the beginning of this century. A 

 general review of the geological distribution of birds was 

 contributed by Milne-Edwards (1863), who also provided, in a 

 large monograph (1867-72) of the fossil birds of France, an 

 osteological basis for the study of this class. In the year 1860 

 a fossil feather was discovered in the Jurassic shales of i 

 Solenhofen, and a year later at Eichstatt a whole skeleton of 

 the oldest fossil bird was found. It was, however, described 

 by A. Wagner as a winged reptile. Sir Richard Owen (1863) 

 recognised in it the characters of a true bird, notwithstanding 

 the long tail and the peculiarly constructed front extremities ; 

 several palaeontologists thought it intermediate between birds 

 and reptiles. A second specimen of Archaeopteryx was found ', 

 at Eichstatt in 1877; it was obtained by the Berlin Museum 

 and described by Dames (1884). In 1875, Marsh drew 

 attention to the occurrence of toothed birds in the Cre- 

 taceous rocks of Kansas, and published a monograph in 1880 ! 

 with excellent illustrations of these Odontornites. The re- 

 markable fossil giant birds of New Zealand were described 

 in detail by Owen (1849-86), and the powerful ^Epyornites of 

 Madagascar were studied by Bianconi, Grandidier, and Milne- 

 Edwards. The comprehensive work of Fiirbringer (1888) 

 contains a full exposition of the phylogenetic relations of fossil 

 and living birds, and is of the utmost importance for the < 

 morphology and classification of birds. 



t 



Mammals. No sub-division of Palaeontology was so far 

 advanced in the beginning of the nineteenth century as that of 

 fossil Mammalia. Cuvier's famous investigations on fossil 

 bones (ante, p. 135) not only contain the principles of a 

 Comparative Osteology, but also show in a manner that has 

 never been surpassed how fossil Vertebrates ought to be 

 studied, and what are the broad inductions which may be 

 drawn from a series of methodical observations. A consider- 



