Quadrupeds, 131 



was a fool : — " Dr. Linnajus has said it, and will you dispute his ve- 

 racity ? " * Peter submitted, and for years swallows continued to 

 dash desperately into the ponds when they beheld the first symptoms 

 of winter, and there clinging to the submerged stems of rushes, they 

 stuck their beaks into the mud, pointed their forked tails to the hea- 

 vens, and calmly and philosophically defied the wintry winds that 

 were raging above, and the hungry eels that were wriggling below. 

 We now begin to think that Linneus was wrong ; and that swallows 

 do fly southward as Peter Collinson imagined. Why then should we 

 deny the liability to err ? Why should we say — "It is useless to en- 

 quire ; it is idle to adduce facts ; the question is set at rest for ever : 

 the creature is a reptile, a genus or subgenus of a well-known family of 

 lizards : Cuvier has said it, and will you dispute his veracity ? " 



There are two points on which I dissent from this dictum : — 1. I 

 consider the pterodactyles to have constituted a large and most re- 

 markable group of animals, equal in extent to the orders of Linneus, 

 and much more diversified in economy than many of these, since it 

 contained carnivorous, piscivorous and insectivorous animals. 2. I 

 consider they were mammalious and clothed with hair. There is still 

 another point in connexion with pterodactyles, at which I merely hint 

 as a matter of surmise. It is this ; that the race may yet probably ex- 

 ist ; that representatives of the fossil pterodactyles may yet be found 

 amongst the bats which abound within the tropics. Had we found 

 the opossum of Stonesfield in a perfect state, with the curious history 

 of its marsupial structure made manifest, anterior to the discovery of 

 America and Australia, we should have thought it a being of another 

 system, so different is an opossum from the animals of the Old World; 

 but those rich regions have supplied the connecting links, and it is 

 more than possible they will do the same for the pterodactyles. Spe- 

 cies and even genera become extinct, but it rarely happens that a vast 

 group like the pterodactyles is wholly lost, and left without a repre- 

 sentative. 



(To be continued). 



Note on the Pterodactyles. — 



*' It is probable also that the pterodactyles had the power of swimming, which is so 

 common in reptiles, and which is now possessed by the Pteropus Pselaphon, or vampire 

 bat of the island of Bonin. Thus like Milton's fiend, all-qualified for all services and 

 all elements, the creature was a fit companion for the kindred reptiles which swarmed 

 in the seas or crawled on the shores of a turbulent planet. 



* liinncan Correspondence, i. r)4. 



k2 



