from the Lithographic Slate of Solenhofen. 369 
belongs, like the other fossils occurring there. The employ- 
ment of the two corresponding slabs was of great service in 
these investigations. No notion of the feather being produced 
by human hands is admissible. No draughtsman could produce 
anything so real. Nor is there any more room to think that a 
feather may have been pressed between two slabs of stone, and 
converted, by some process or other, into an artificial fossil. By 
careful examination it will be found that, notwithstanding its 
delicacy, the feather has produced slight impressions in the 
stone. The stone was therefore not fully hardened at the time 
of its being deposited. The substance into which the feather 
has been changed reminds one of the dendritic deposits; but 
dendritic formations have nothing to do with it. The mode of 
preservation resembles that of the birds’ feathers which I have 
examined from Tertiary strata, and which I shall shortly 
publish. 
As evidence of the genuineness of the feather, I may also 
state that upon the same cleavage-surface of the stone many 
small, fine, blackish fibres, like short hairs, are scattered about ; 
these will likewise be derived from the epidermic covering of the 
animal. ‘The fibres of the vane acquire a more hairlike aspect 
towards the quill, and in its immediate vicinity there are also 
numerous little isolated hairs, or shorter and not plumose 
filaments. 
The genuineness of the feather found in the Lithographic 
Slate of Solenhofen is consequently not to be doubted. 
As early as the year 1834 I indicated the danger to which we 
expose ourselves in paleontology by drawing logical conclusions 
in accordance with Cuvier’s theory, from the similarity of parti- 
cular parts as to the similarity of other parts or of the whole. 
I at the same time showed that, in one and the same creature, 
the most different types may occur together, purely developed. 
The fossil feather of Solenhofen, therefore, even if agreeing per- 
fectly with those of our birds, need not necessarily be derived 
from a bird. And, indeed, a feathered animal, differing essen- 
tially from our birds, has occurred in the Lithographic Slate*. 
My first information about this was received by me, just after 
the completion of my investigations, from M. Witte of Hanover. 
This gentleman saw, in the possession of M. Haberlein of Pap- 
penheim, upon a slab of Solenhofen slate, about 14 square foot 
in size, an animal of which he remarked that it possessed feathers, 
and that the feathers of the tail were attached, not, as in birds, 
to the last vertebra, but on each side of the caudal vertebre. 
The feathers were, moreover, quite distinctly furnished with stem 
and vane. Soon afterwards, Professor Oppel of Munich wrote 
* See ‘Annals,’ April 1862, p. 261. 
