315 
Few indeed of the supposed ornitholites of modern writers can 
support their claim to this distinction, when subjected to a careful 
examination. Thus the birds beaks from J ena and Weimar, men- 
tioned by Wallerius and Linneeus, are substances which, according to 
Walch, merely bear an external resemblance to these bodies. 
But when it is recollected, that plants of the family of ferns, of 
mimosa, and of other terrestrial plants, are found in the same stones 
with the fossil fish at Yestena Nuova, (Eningen, Pappenheim, and 
Rochesauve, no doubt can exist, that at the period when these fishes 
existed in the ocean, the whole surface of the globe could not be 
covered with water, but there were parts of the earth in which the 
riches of vegetation were displayed. Ann. du Mus. T. hi. p. 19- 
That a small part only of the surface of the earth was not then 
covered by water is also rendered highly probable, by the rareness 
with which the fossil remains of birds have been met with. So seldom, 
indeed, have such fossils been seen, that their existence has been 
doubted, I believe I may assert, by the greater number of oryctologists. 
Passing the erroneous accounts of the earlier writers on this subject, 
who appear to have considered different incrustations and figured 
stones as real fossil remains of birds, we have had the figure of a 
supposed ornitholite given in one of the numbers of the Journal de 
Physique, and the original specimen having been examined by M. P. 
Camper and the Abbe Fortis, neither of them would admit its sup- 
posed origin. An engraving was also given, in the same work, 
Thermidor,An. 8, of a stone, with the impression of the two legs of a 
bird ; but it is said, that no one at Paris has seen the original specimen. 
In the same work, however, an indubitable ornitholite, the foot of a 
bird, incrusted in the gypsum from the quarries of Clignancourt, near 
Montmartre, is figured and described by Cuvier, showing that real 
ornitholites exist in the ancient beds of gypsous matter. Blumenbach 
mentions the discovery of the bones of a water-fowl in the marly 
schist of (Eningen, and the bone of one of the anseres in the calca- 
