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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
the Academy of Munich an account of the discovery of a fossil 
with divergent fans of feathers, of which he had been informed 
by M. Witte, the mayor of Pappenheim. Wagner, who was 
very ill at the time, in fact dying, never saw the specimen, but 
concluded, from the description he had received, that the 
remains must be those of a reptile, and named it the G-ripho- 
saurus. The familiar presence in the same beds of lithographic 
stone of flying reptiles, the Pterodactyles, aided Wagner’s error, 
and a furore was created in the scientific world. After Wagner’s 
death, the fossil was purchased from M. Haberlein, of Pappen- 
heim, in whose collection it was, for our national collection, — 
not under the idea, however, that it was a feathered reptile, for 
both Professor Owen and Mr. Waterhouse were satisfied of its 
ornithic nature. 
Bird-remains, so perfect and so extraordinary, and from so 
ancient a stratum, were, however, a desideratum of the highest 
scientific importance, especially when the creature possessed 
the extraordinary character of a long vertebrate tail. 
After Professor Owen’s elaborate and accurate examination, 
no doubt can remain as to its bird-like nature — the presence of 
a furculum or “ merrythought,” and the “ perching ” form of 
the leg and foot, with many other less prominent features, are 
sufficient to establish this. But it will be desirable to notice 
some of those abnormal characteristics which render it so very 
remarkable in a zoological point of view, and which make it 
imperative to show distinctly that it does not possess reptilian 
characters. The powers of flight possessed by the Pterodactyles, 
the long vertebrate tail of one of them — the Rhamphorhynchus — 
found in the same strata with the Archseopteryx, and the general 
tendency of naturalists to seek for, and perhaps too readily to 
accept, any evidences, supposed or real, of a transmutation of 
species, have in the present case fostered the original idea of a 
“ feathered reptile,” and led to a wide-spread readiness to 
accept the, as yet, untenable doctrine of the transmutation of 
flying reptiles into birds. 
Plight is not the peculiar property of birds alone, although 
they possess it in a degree of perfection unknown to any other 
animal, and although through it they are clothed in garments of 
such exquisite delicacy and beauty ; so essentially is it the 
prominent idea of their whole structure, that we have not only 
universally come to regard it as their special attribute, but as 
universally to view the bird as the typical and bodily expression 
of the idea of flight. Still, the bat flies, and the flying- 
squirrel ( Pteromys ) on outspread wing-sails shoots from bough 
to bough. Yet both are mammals ; in the one the long fingers 
of the fore-arms spread out the side-skin into wings (Plate XVII., 
fig. 8) ; in the other it is but the same loose expanded skin that 
