FEATHERED FORMS OF OTHER DAYS. 
O F all those great classes into which sys- 
tematists and biologians have divided ex- 
isting vertebrate forms, none stand out more 
sharply defined from all the other divisions 
than the class Aves, or living birds, meaning 
of course, as I do, birds as we now find them; 
for we shall see in the sequel that this has not 
always been the case. Anatomists have long 
appreciated, from their knowledge of the pres- 
ence of certain well-known characters of in- 
ternal structure, the firm foundation upon 
which this fact rests ; it would be entirely for- 
eign to my object or the aims of this article, 
however, to enumerate, much less discuss, any 
of these technicalities, though I would invite 
the reader’s attention to one of the minor 
external characters — one which first impres- 
sions might lead us to think important, but 
which really is a light weight in the minds 
of taxonomists, — and that is the development 
in birds, and in birds alone, of feathers. A lit- 
tle later we shall have something to say upon 
the subject of feathers. 
Finding one class, at least, apparently so 
completely isolated from all other animals, it 
is hardly to be wondered at that in early 
days, clouded as they were by popular super- 
stition and the common belief in the immu- 
tableness of all living things and the separate 
creation of species, the old-time naturalists 
thought and wrote as they did, and passed 
down to us the classifications in natural history 
that we find in their works. They did a great 
deal for us, and we must close our eyes to 
many of their shortcomings and apparent 
shortsightedness; for things that seem sim- 
ple to us now have but in a comparatively 
short period of time been made so. 
Until the time of our favorite Agassiz, or 
still later on, naturalists worked away in their 
closets and in the field, firmly believing that 
species had always been as they then found 
them ; and most certainly, it never occurred 
to them that birds had not always existed as 
birds in their present lovely forms. 
We must not presume to allow ourselves 
to think, however, that this long epoch was 
lived through without a gleam of the knowl- 
edge of the true inwardness of things. As 
early as the middle of the last centqry, 
doubts as to the soundness of the then ac- 
cepted views of nature arose in the mind of 
the well-beloved naturalist of France, the 
Comte de Buffon. The illustrious Lamarck 
followed Buffon in 1801; then came the 
published views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 
in 1828; since which time first an ethnologist, 
then a biologist, then a botanist, and after 
them other special workers in the fields of 
science, added knowledge that in 1859 cul- 
minated in the “ Origin of Species,” by the 
immortal Darwin. What a flood of light 
has been cast over ornithology, the ever- 
favorite subject of all young naturalists, and 
fascinating to us all, since that time — since 
1861, we may say, when Hermann von Meyer 
described the single feather of his Archceop- 
teryx lit ho graphic a, which had been found in 
the lithographic slate of Solenhofen in Bavaria, 
a geological horizon belonging to the Upper 
Jurassic. 
Two years later England’s great anatomist, 
Professor Owen, gave to the world his cele- 
brated memoir, wherein he accurately de- 
scribes the fossil remains of a creature in a slab, 
to which perhaps the feather in the posses- 
sion of Herr Hermann von Meyer belonged. 
This valuable relic, now in the British Mu- 
seum, was thought by everybody who ex- 
amined it, to belong to a curious bird, and 
Professor Owen changed its original specific 
name from lithographica to macrura, impressed 
as he was by the long tail of the specimen, 
the hinder parts of which were the only ones 
that had been at all well preserved, in the 
then only example existing in the world. 
A dozen or more years rolled by, and the 
hope of ever finding a second specimen of 
Archceopteryx had nearly died out in the 
minds of scientific men, when the son of the 
physician of Pappenheim, Dr. Haberlein, who 
found the first slab described, discovered the 
leg-bones of a fossil that he at once believed 
to be another Archccopteiyx, — I think from the 
same Solenhofen slate beds. 
The trained hand of Herr Haberlein was 
accustomed to disengage the rarest of fossil 
treasures from their matrix, but what delicacy 
of stroke was needed here ! The unerring 
blow was given, and the two halves of the 
slab fell asunder — at once proving the cor- 
rectness of the doctor’s suspicions and giving 
to the world another and almost perfect ex- 
ample of this the rarest of fossils. 
Herr Haberlein afterwards cleared nearly 
the entire skeleton from its matrix, and, after 
passing through other hands, it was eventually 
sought for first by Germany, then by the mu- 
seum at Geneva. A very large sum was at one 
time given for it, as it passed from one to 
