﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. lxiU 



in the Society's Museum, a task which he kindly undertook. He 

 reports to me that all the bones, more than twenty in number, are 

 those of birds, except two which belong to Pterodactyls and are cha- 

 racterized by that minute structure which Mr. Bowerbank found, in 

 1847, in the Pterodactyls of the chalk. The Wealden fossil which 

 Cuvier and Mantell once referred to a wading bird seems to be refer- 

 able to a Pterodactyl, for reasons pointed out by Prof. Owen. But 

 Dr. Mantell is still of opinion, that he had in his collection from the 

 Wealden a portion of the ulna of a bird on which there was a distinct 

 row of slight eminences, like the tubercles on the ulna of some birds, 

 for the attachment of the large wing-feathers. This specimen has 

 been transferred to the British Museum, and well deserves to be sought 

 for and figured. 



The Protornis Glariensis of H. von Meyer, found in the slates of 

 Glaris in Switzerland, was formerly cited as an example of a creta- 

 ceous bird. But according to the classification of the Alpine strata 

 lately proposed by Sir Roderick Murchison, you will observe that 

 this schist is about the age of the nummulitic limestone, and there- 

 fore an eocene rock*. 



The long-winged bird of the chalk, called Cimoliornis by Prof. 

 Owen, formerly considered as allied to the albatros, has now 

 proved, as Mr. Bowerbank had inferred from the structure and pro- 

 portions of the bone-cells, to be a Pterodactyl, the jaws, skulls, and 

 wing-bones of three species of these flying reptiles having been found 

 in the white chalk without flints, above the chalk marl in Kent. Mr. 

 Bowerbank estimates the largest of these species, judging from the 

 size of the bones as compared to corresponding portions of Pterodac- 

 tyls, of which we have the more or less perfect skeletons, to have 

 been so gigantic that it measured 1 6 feet 6 inches from tip to tip of 

 the outstretched wings f. 



Some geologists have suggested that these flying reptiles, when 

 very abundant, may have performed many of the functions now dis- 

 charged in the animal kingdom by winged and feathered bipeds. Jt 

 may be so ; but the numerous foot-prints of tridactyle bipeds of 

 various sizes in the trias of North America, and the fragments of 

 ornithic bones from Stonesfield, above adverted to, should put us on 



* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol, v. p. 199. 

 f Zool. Proceedings, Jan. 14, 1851. 



