204 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



night depend on the strength of these settings ? If the supply of 

 fire-supporting gases swept in grand spiral currents to the central 

 burning sun, would the planets float in these currents in spiral or- 

 bital revolutions ? Then, indeed, Kepler's law would hold good that 

 the further from the sun the slower the orbital motion. But with 

 an original projectile velocity that result could never happen. 



FOSSIL BIEDS. 

 By the Editor. 



{.Continued from page 53.) 



It is certainly very much out of stratigraphical order to jump 

 from the fossil bird-remains of the Stonesfield Slate to those of the 

 Tertiary beds of the Paris basin ; nor. is such a step in any accord- 

 ance with historical order. We are simply compelled to take it, 

 through the necessity of saying a few words in explanation of certain 

 plates which have been issued with the previous numbers of this 

 volume. The gap, however, in the historical series is not so very 

 wide ; and it is by no means useless in this place to run over afresh 

 the review which the great Cuvier made of the labours of his prede- 

 cessors. A section of vol. iii. of his famous work, ' Recherches sur les 

 Ossements Fossiles,' published in 1812,* was devoted to the remains 

 of birds. " Naturalists," he begins, " are agreed that, of all animals, 

 birds are those whose bones or other relics are the most rarely found 

 in the fossil state. Some even absolutely deny that any have ever 

 been met with ; and indeed, by oue of those singular accidents re- 

 served for the beds of gypsum of our neighbourhood, there are 

 scarcely any other well-preserved fossil bones of birds than those 

 they have furnished." He then, to show the correctness of this 

 statement, and the then recent knowledge even of the fossil birds of 

 the pldtrieres of Paris, glances over the statements of Walch, Her- 

 mann, Camper, Blumenbaeh, Faujas, Lamanon, Gesner, Luid, Wal- 

 lerius and Linnaeus, Davila and others, the accounts of most of 

 which have been already given in our previous articles. 



" Walch, he savs, " had met with several ; Hermann added others. 

 Their indications serve us as guides, without however exempting us 

 from going to the original; for the first deceives himself many times 

 in spite of this precaution." Conrad Gesner, he observes, early de- 

 clared that the stones named after birds, such as the liieracites and 

 the perdicites, had no other affinity with them than resemblances of 

 colour; but " rude figures of birds," he adds, " accidentally traced in 

 coloured stones, certainly do not properly belong to the Omitholites, 



* We quote from the 5th edition, published in 1835. — S. J. M. 



