SILVERED GLASS REFLECTING TELESCOPES. HORNE & THORNTHWAITE Have the pleasure to state that they have become Sole Agents for CALVER'S REFLECTING TELESCOPES. These instruments can be confidently recom mended, and the Specula are guaranteed to be of the finest quality, some of them having been compared by competent observers with large achromatics with the most satisfactory results. The new form of altazimuth mounting adopted has this great advantage over the ordinary kind, that it can be pointed to any part of the sky without shifting the base of the stand. HORNE & THORNTHWAITE beg to call attention to the following List of Prices, which are the lowest compatible with a thoroughly reliable instrument :— REFLECTING TELESCOPES COMPLETE. Each with two Eye-pieces. CALVER'S SILVERED-GLASS SPECULA (unmounted), 5-in. diameter, 5-ft. focus £5 0 0 8-in. diameter, 6-ft. focus £13 0 0 25 0 0 ' HINTS ON REFLECTORS,' containing much practical advice as to their management, power, silvering, &c. post free, 5 stamps. DISSOLVING VIEW APPARATUS. The Lecturer's Set of Oxycalcium Dissolving View Apparatus, of first-class manufacture, mahogany body Lantern, with handsome brass fronts, 4-inch condensers; Fountain Oxycalcium Lamp; Gas Bag, PressureBoards; Oxygen Retort and Purifier, Conducting Tube; and with supply of Lime Balls and Oxygen Mixture, with full directions for use. £21. The School Set of Oxycalcium Dissolving View Apparatus, with Lanterns having 3-inch condensers, and the extra apparatus as above described. £14. 14s. Dissolving View Apparatus, with Argand Oil Lamps Common Lanterns in every variety. £8 8 0 310 0 For other Sets and complete Lists of Slides, see our Lantern List. HORNE & THORNTHWAITE, OPTICIANS, Chemical, Philosophical, & Photographic Instrument Makers, To the Queen, Royal Observatory, Indian & Chinese Governments, &c. 416 STRAND, LONDON (Four Doors West of the Adelphi Theatre). Removed from Newgate Street and Holborn Viaduct. 337 BIRDS WITH TEETH. BY HENRY WOODWARD, F.R.S., F.G.S., ETC. OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM. [PLATE CXXV.] ONE NE of the greatest difficulties which the systematic naturalist meets with in the examination of the fauna of a new country is that his old ideas of classification are perpetually shaken by contact with new and strange life-forms, whose places are the more hard to fix in proportion to the procrustean character of the system into which he strives to fit them. Nor can he escape from the dilemma by refusing to admit them altogether, like Dr. Shaw in the days of old, who (so the story goes), on finding a shell, not described in Linnæus's "Systema Naturæ," gave it a rap with his hammer and brushed it away! But, great as are his difficulties, they are light compared with those which the palæontologist encounters as he exhumes the fragmentary relics of bygone faunas, and strives by the help of existing organisms to rehabilitate the crumbling remains of a former world. For he knows that the vast assemblage of living forms which he sees around him to-day have sprung, by descent, from the earlier life of the past, and that consequently no system of classification can be deemed complete unless it embrace both Neozoic and Palæozoic faunas, linking together in one wide and comprehensive scheme the living present with the dead and far-off past. In striving to attain to this much-to-be-desired classification, however, a serious obstacle arises from our very imperfect knowledge of the greater number of extinct animals, especially those belonging to the higher forms. Of their soft parts we can know but very little, whilst with the skeleton itself we are, as a rule, only able to attain to a very imperfect acquaintance. There is perhaps no order of animals to which these remarks apply with greater force than to that of Birds. Although their remains in a fossil state are but few in number, they nevertheless possess a remarkable degree of interest which even the more abundant relics of other classes cannot supersede. Ornitholites have been met with in at least a dozen different localities in the Tertiary deposits of Europe, and also at two or three places in our own island. Specimens have been obtained from the Miocene of Allier in France, which M. Alphonse Milne-Edwards has referred to about seventy species of birds of various groups, some of which do not belong to the present fauna. Parrots and Trogons inhabited the woods; the edible swifts built their nests among the rocks; a "secretary bird," a marabout stork, a flamingo, an ibis, and other birds served to give to these localities in early Miocene times a strikingly South African facies. The bird-bones of the Mayence Basin present a complete similarity to those of Allier. Bird-remains occur also in the Miocene of Eningen, near the Lake of Constance; in the Upper Eocene of Puy de Dôme, Perignat, and Auvergne; from the Eocene of Montmartre and Meudon, near Paris, whence M. Alphonse Milne-Edwards has also determined several new genera of birds, as the Cryptornis and the Palæogithalus, whilst the Gypsornis is described as the giant of the family of "Rails," being as large as a stork. From our own Eocene of Hordwell and Sheppey Prof. Owen has recorded the genera Halcyornis and Lithornis; also a large struthious bird of the size of the living ostrich (the Dasornis Londiniensis), and a still more remarkable bird, the Odontopteryx toliapicus, to be presently referred to more fully. With the two exceptions of the Eocene slate-rocks of the Canton Glaris, in which the almost entire skeleton of a small passerine bird, about the size of a lark, has been discovered, and the gypsum quarries of Montmartre, where two or three connected skeletons of different species of birds have been found, these remains consist of detached bones or fragments only, or of eggs or feather impressions.† Parts of a large "fossil" bird have been obtained from the Sewalik Hills, India; whilst Madagascar has yielded to the studies of M. Alphonse Milne-Edwards and others, remains of three species of Epyornis, whose affinities are clearly recognisable with the Dinornis and Apatornis of New Zealand. In the recent deposits of the Mascarenes the remains of the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles," 1871, sér. 5, Zoologie, tom. xvi. † See "Ueber Fossile Eier und Federn," von Hermann von Meyer. "Palæontographica." Cassel, (1865-68), pp. 223-259, pl. 36-38, in which eggs and feathers are described and figured from about ten separate locali ties. |