SYSTEM OF NATURE. 
145 
greatest importance; and when one or two are missing, or are increased 
or reduced in size, the greatest care is required in discovering which of 
them has undergone the change. Bearing this in mind, let us count 
the fingers and toes themselves before we descend to the joints, and we 
shall see that the pterodactyles have no more than four , and the lizards no 
less than five. The fact of this discrepancy was well known to Dr. 
Buckland, who supposes that the fifth, or little finger and little toe, are 
the members that are missing. We are quite without proof on this sub¬ 
ject ; but supposing the thumb and great toe to be the missing members, 
which from the distance, detached appearance, and occasional absence of 
the thumb, is highly probable, then I think it will appear that the so- 
called thumb becomes the first finger, the so-called great toe becomes the 
second toe, and so on with all the rest; and thus the numerical corre¬ 
spondence in the joints will require revision. Again, I must confess 
that since we possess such an admirable figure of Pterodactylus crassi- 
rostris, (a figure accurately copied into Dr. Buckland’s work), I should 
have preferred an appeal to this alone, rather than the introduction of 
the restored skeleton of Goldfuss, in which a fifth finger, so important 
in this discussion, is introduced, and its joints defined and numbered, 
not merely from imagination, but in obvious opposition to fact, no such 
finger having any existence in nature. Again, I may perhaps be al¬ 
lowed to remark, that in the figure of Draco volans, the fifth finger, 
which that singular animal undoubtedly possesses, has been accidentally 
omitted, a circumstance which serves to bring the five-fingered dragon a 
little nearer the four-fingered pterodactyle, just as the donation of the 
non-existent finger, to which I before alluded, seems to approximate the 
four-fingered pterodactyle to the five-fingered dragon. It would be tri¬ 
fling to notice little inaccuracies of this kind, did not the present position 
of Pterodactylus in the ‘ System of Nature’ in some measure depend on 
them. I may also observe that Dr. Buckland has figured and num¬ 
bered a very remarkable bone, particularly in Pterodactylus brevirostris, 
but I cannot find any reference to this in the description of the plate. 
This omission does not occur in the earlier works, but perhaps the defi¬ 
nition of Goldfuss and others may not appear satisfactory: by whatever 
name this bone may be called it is very evidently the analogue of the 
marsupial bone. 
One observation more. It is well known that there is a striated ap- 
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