papillæ has remained as sharply as if made in wax. But the immense size of some of these footprints served to militate for a time against belief in their ornithic origin. The impressions that are but secondary in point of size greatly exceed those of the hugest birds which now exist; while those of the largest class equal the prints of the bulkier quadrupeds. There are tridactyle footprints in the red sandstones of Connecticut that measure eighteen inches in length from the heel to the middle claw, nearly thirteen inches in breadth from the outer to the inner toe, and which indicate, from their distance apart in the straight line, a stride of about six feet in the creature that impressed them in these ancient sands,--measurements that might well startle zoologists who had derived their experience of the ornithic class from existing birds exclusively. Comparatively recent discoveries have, however, if not lessened, at least familiarized us to the wonder. In a deposit of New Zealand that dates little if at all in advance of the human period, there have been detected the remains of birds scarce inferior in size to those of America in the Liassic ages. The bones of the _Dinornus giganteus_, exhibited by the late Dr. Mantell in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1850, greatly exceeded in bulk those of the largest horse. A thigh bone sixteen inches in length measured nearly nine inches in circumference in the middle of the shaft: the head of a tibia measured twenty-one inches in circumference. It was estimated that a foot entire in all its parts, which formed an interesting portion of the exhibition, would, when it was furnished with nails, and covered by the integuments, have measured about fifteen inches in length; and it was calculated by a very competent authority, Professor Owen, that of the other bones of the leg to which it belonged, the tibia must have been about two feet nine inches, and the femur about fourteen and a half inches long. The larger thigh bone referred to must have belonged, it was held, to a bird that stood from eleven to twelve feet high,--the extreme height of the great African elephant. Such were the monster birds of a comparatively recent period; and their remains serve to render credible the evidence furnished by the great footprints of their remote predecessors of the Lias. The huge feet of the greatest Dinornus whose bones have yet been found would have left impressions scarcely an inch shorter than those of the still huger birds of the Connecticut. Is it not truly wonderful, that in this late age of the world, in which the invention of the poets seems to content itself with humbler and lowlier flights than of old, we should thus find the facts of geology fully rivalling, in the strange and the _outré_, the wildest fancies of the romancers who flourished in the middle ages? I have already referred to flying dragons,--real existences of the Oolitic period,--that were quite as extraordinary of