MACKIE — ON FOSSIL BIRDS. 



13 



Transactions"* for 1786, writing about them in a very doubtful man- 

 ner : — 



" Dr. Michaels wrote me some time ago that the above-mentioned 

 fragment in Mr. J. Hunter's collection belonged to a bird, which I 

 could hardly believe, as I never had seen in any collection whatsoever, 

 either in Loudon, Paris, Brussels, Gottingen, Cassel, Bruuswick, 

 Hanover, or Berlin, nor in my o a t ii country, any fossil bone belong- 

 ing to a bird. I know there is a small one described in the Abbe 

 Rozier's ' Journal de Physique' for March, 1782, which is at present 

 in the collection of M. d'Arcet, at Paris. 1 expect also from Mont- 

 mart re a small leg of a petrified bird, but these are the only ones I 

 have ever heard of; those of Stonefield, near Woodstock, being un- 

 doubtedly fishes. I think it is a curious circumstance worthy the at- 

 tention of the curious, that no human bones, and of birds but very- 

 few, have hitherto been found in a petrified state belonging to the Old 

 World." 



Having now run through the more or less doubtful and apocry- 

 phal statements of the early naturalists and geologists, we may at- 

 tempt to follow out a stratigraphical arrangement of the remainder 

 of the mass of materials before us, giving the various discoveries and 

 accounts at the same time as nearly as may in their proper sequence, 

 and reserving for our concluding summary the comments, and any 

 disputations of the ordinarily received opinions of geologists. We 

 then take here the supposed earliest geological traces of birds; the 

 footprints in the so-called Connecticut New Red Sandstone. We 

 leave for the present the dispute as to the Trias being the correct 

 period to which to assign those strata, for even if these Red Sand- 

 stone beds should really belong to the Jurassic series, the footprints 

 they contain would still be the earliest traces of ornithic life we as 

 yet possess. 



The first specimen of the footmarks in the valley of the Connec- 

 ticut river was ploughed up in South Hadley in 1802, by Pliny 

 Moody, Esq., then a boy, before he went to college. This specimen, 

 containing a row of fine tracks, was purchased by Dr. Dwight, of 

 South Hadley, and is now in the Appleton Ichnological Cabinet 

 (No. 16/2). So strikingly did these tracks resemble those of birds 

 that they were familiarly spoken of as the tracks of " poultry" or of 

 " Noah's Raven. "f 



It was not, however, until 1836, that any attempt was made to 

 describe these tracks scientifically. The year previous some flag- 

 stones were obtained in Montague for the streets in Greenfield, by 



* Phil. Trans., vol. lxxvi., 1786, p. 451. 



f Mr. Dexter Marsh, however, in a letter to Professor Silliman, in 1848, says, " You 

 will recollect that the first specimen of fossil footprints of hirds ever hrought into public 

 notice in this country (United States) was the slab I discovered among the fiagging-stone, 

 while laying the ftaggi tig-stone near my house, which Dr. Deane first described to Presi- 

 dent Hitchcock as the footprints of birds," — from which statement it would seem that 

 Mr. Marsh claims to be the first to notice these impressions, and Professor Hitchcock 

 adds, in conversation with Mr. Wilson, " I understood him to claim the discovery." 

 (Amer. Journal Science, vol. vi. new ser. p. 2?2.) 



