72 Correspondence of Jerome Nickles. 
At Madrid the trials are very encouraging. At the park of , 
wn, 
triches often break their limbs from the weakness of the bones; 
and the eggs of the birds are also very fragile. It has been re- 
marked that ostrich feathers are of the greater value where 
there are less woods and thorns in the places where these birds 
live. It is on this account that the ostriches of the Cape fur- 
nish feathers of medium quality, for they are torn off by the 
thick woods of the region, The farther we go toward the north 
in the desert and the dry and barren country, the better are the 
ostrich feathers. 
On fossil man.—Sir Charles Lyell in his work “On the an- 
tiquity of man proved by Geology,” in chap, xv, mentions only 
two discoveries of human remains in the Alpine diluvium or 
Post-pliocene, so abundant in the valley of the Rhine, and espe- 
cially at Alsace, in the two districts of the Haut-Rhin and Bas- 
Rhin. The first is that of a portion of a human skeleton found 
in 1823, by Boué, near the village of Lahr, on the right bank of 
the Rhine. e bed containing these bones was the alpine di- 
luvium in question (the loess). This diluvium was in an entirely 
undisturbed state, and presented its characteristic fossil shells. 
The history of this discovery is known, Cuvier, to. whom they 
were submitted, on recognizing that they were human remains, 
__ * Journal de Pharm. et de Chimie, Sept. 1867. 
aes a: 
-~ 
