MACKIE — ON FOSSIL BIRDS. 13 
Trausactions"* 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 London, Paris, Brussels, Gottingen, Cassel, Brunswick, 
Hanover, or Berlin, nor in my own country, any fossil bone belong- 
ing to a bird. I know there is a small one described in the Abbe 
Kozier's 'Journal de Physique' for March, 1782, which is at present 
in the collection of M. d'Arcet, at Paris. I expect also from Mont- 
i martre a small leg of a petrified bird, but these are the only ones I 
have ever heard of; those of Stonefield, near AVoodstock, 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 stratii,a'aphical 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 
I 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 Ccmiiecticut New Red Sandstone. We 
I 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- 
i 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."t 
It was not, however, until 1836, that any attempt was made to 
describe these tracks scientifically. The year previous some flag- 
I stones were obtained in Montague for the streets in Grreenfield, by 
* Phil. Trans., vol. Ixxvi., 1786, p. 451. 
t Mr. Dexter Marsh, however, in a letter to Professor Silliman, in 1848, says, " You 
will recollect that the first specimen of fossil footprints of birds ever brought into public 
notice in this country (United States) was the slab I discovered among the llagging-stone, 
while laying the flagging-stone near my house, which Dr. Deane lirst 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. 272.) 
