204 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
night depend on the strength of these settings ? If the snpply 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. 
rOSSIL 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, ' Eecherches sur les 
Ossements Fossiles,' published in 1812,* was devoted to the remains 
of birds. " Xaturalists," 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 one 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 tlian those 
they have furnished." He then, to show the correctness of this 
statement, and the then recent knowledge even of the fossil birds of 
i\\e pldtrieres of Paris, glances over the statements of Walch, Her- 
mann, Camper, Blumenbaoh, Paujas, Lamanon, Gesner, Luid, Wal- 
lerius and Linnaeus, Davila and others, the accounts of most of 
which have been already given in our previous articles. 
" AValch, he says, " 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 hieracites 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 Ornitholites, 
* We quote from the 5tli edition, published in 1835.— S. J. :^r. 
