286 C. H. HURST, PH.D. 



lake, or sea, will naturally fall to the level of the underlying deposit 

 as fast as the decay of the soft parts allows them to do so. The weight 

 of overlying deposits may even flatten out ribs and bring them all to 

 one level. It may even crush, the bones where they lie one over the 

 other — I am not sure that this has not occurred in the left hand — 

 but it has not, in this case, crushed the skull, or the phalanges of the 

 third digit of the right hand, or the pelvis ; and it has not brought 

 the proximal ends of the two femoral bones into juxtaposition. Had 

 it brought the digits IV and V to the same level as I, II, and III, we 

 should have seen them, and these latter might well have been crushed 

 by them; but the perfect preservation of these digits, even where they 

 cross each other, and the fact that they do lie, especially the second, 

 well above the level of the feather-surface, shows that there has been 

 n this case little, if any, deformation by pressure of overlying strata ; 

 hence the absence of all trace of digits IV and V on the surface. If 

 any such deformation had occurred it would have brought II and III 

 to the level of the feather-surface. No matter, therefore, what pressure 

 there may have been, the fact that those digits II and III lie now 

 above that surface shows that they did originally lie above it, and not 

 below it as all views except my own demand. 



C. Herbert Hurst. 



Literature referred to in the Foregoing Article. 

 Owen.— Phil. Trans., 1863. 

 Dames. — Ueber Archaeopteryx. Berlin, 1884. 

 Pycraet. — Natural Science. Vol. 5, p. 350 and p. 437. 

 Leighton. — Tufts College Studies, No. III. 

 Hurst. — Natural Science. Vol. 3, p. 275 ("Errors") 



Vol. 6, p. 112, p. 180, and p. 244. 

 (The present article is in large part reprinted from Natural Science, Vol. 6.J 



EXPLANATION OP PLATES. 

 Plate XIV. 

 Photograph of left wing of Archceopteryx, from the specimen in the Natural 

 History Museum, Berlin (two-thirds nat. size). 



