Prof. Hitchcock on Fossil Footmarks, Lincolnite, Sfc. 61 



Art. VT. — Extract of a Letter from Prof. E. Hitchcock^ embra- 

 cing miscellaneous Remarks upoti Fossil Footmarks, the Lin- 

 colnite, c5*c., and a Letter from Professor Richard Owen, on 

 the great Birds^ Nests of New Holland. 



TO THE EDITORS. 



Since you have published in your Journal the account by Cook 

 and Flinders, of the great bird nests found by them in New Hol- 

 land, it strikes rae that your readers will be glad to see the opin- 

 ion of one so eminently qualified to judge concerning them as 

 Prof. Owen. I therefore copy the following letter from him on 

 the subject, lately received; and not the less willingly, because 

 his opinion is adverse to the suggestions which I made, (I cannot 

 say adverse to my opifiion, since I had not made up my belief 

 fully,) that they might be the nest of the Dinornis; for truth 

 should be the grand object in view, rather than support to one's 

 own notions. 



College of Surgeons, London, August 30, 1844. 



Dear Sir — I beg to acknowledge your friendly letter of the 

 23d of July, which has just reached me. I have long been aware 

 of the notice of the large birds' nests, by Cook and Flinders. 

 Sir Robert Inglis was kind enough to write out an account of 

 them for me, soon after my first suspicions of a bird of extraor- 

 dinary stature in New Zealand, had been excited by the fragment 

 of bone, which I afterwards described in the Zoological Trans- 

 actions, in 1839. Independently, however, of the different local- 

 ity of the nests, Mr. Gould's interesting description, in the 

 " Birds of Australia," of the enormous ones built in common, by 

 the Dalagella or brush turkey of Australia, and by the Megapo- 

 diiis, warns us of the danger of inferring too absolutely, the size 

 of a bird from that of its nest. 



Nests constructed as Cook and Flinders describe, cannot resist 

 the action of the elements many years, unless annually repaired. 

 It would be a very extreme hypothesis, to suppose the nests, seen 

 by the circumnavigators, to have been the enduring evidence of 

 extinct species; but say that they were of comparatively recent 

 construction, and the work of existing species, if such species 

 were terrestrial, brevipennate birds, of a bulk proportioned to the 



