CHAP. XXII. FEATHERED ARCHEOPTERYX OF THE OOLITE. 451

The last and most striking of these novelties is the feathered fossil' from the lithographic stone of Solenhofen.

Until the year 1858, no well-determined skeleton of a bird had been detected in any rocks older than the tertiary. In that year, Mr. Lucas Barrett found in the upper greensand of the cretaceous series, near Cambridge, the femur, tibia, and some other bones of a swimming bird, supposed by him to be of the gull tribe. His opinion as to the ornithic character of the remains was afterwards confirmed by Professor Owen.

The Archaeopteryx macrurus, Owen, recently acquired by the British Museum, affords a second example of the discovery of the osseous remains of a bird in strata older than the Eocene. It was found in the great quarries of lithographic limestone at Solenhofen in Bavaria, the rock being a member of the Upper Oolite.

It was at first conjectured in Germany, before any experienced osteologist had had an opportunity of inspecting the original specimen, that this fossil might be a feathered pterodactyl, (flying reptiles having been often met with in the same stratum,) or that it might at least supply some connecting links between a reptile and a bird. But Professor Owen, in a memoir lately read to the Royal Society, (November 20, 1862,) has shown that it is unequivocally a bird, and that such of its characters as are abnormal are by no means strikingly reptilian. The skeleton was lying on its back when embedded in calcareous sediment, so that the ventral part is exposed to view. It is about one foot eight inches long, and one foot four across, from the apex of the right to that of the left wing. The furculum, or merrythought, which is entire, marks the fore part of the trunk; the ischium, scapula, and most of the wing and leg bones are preserved, and there are impressions of the quill feathers

452

FEATHERED ARCHEOPTERYX OF THE OOLITE. СПАР. ХХІІ.

and of down on the body. The vanes and shafts of the feathers can be seen by the naked eye. Fourteen long quill feathers diverge on each side of the metacarpal and phalangial bones, and decrease in length from six inches to one inch. The wings have a general resemblance to those of gallinaceous birds. The tarso-metatarsal, or drumstick, exhibits at its distal end a trifid articular surface supporting three toes, as in birds. The furculum, pelvis, and bones of the tail are in their natural position. The tail consists of twenty vertebræ, each of which supports a pair of plumes. The length of the tail with its feathers is eleven and a half inches, and its breadth three and a half. It is obtusely truncated at the end. In all living birds the tail-feathers are arranged in fan-shaped order and attached to a coccygean bone, consisting of several vertebræ united together, whereas in the embryo state these same vertebræ are distinct. The greatest number is seen in the ostrich, which has eighteen caudal vertebræ in the fœtal state, which are reduced to nine in the adult bird, many of them having been anchylosed together. Professor Owen therefore considers the tail of the Archeopteryx as exemplifying the persistency of what is now an embryonic character. The tail, he remarks, is essentially a variable organ; there are long-tailed bats and short-tailed bats, longtailed rodents and short-tailed rodents, long-tailed pterodactyls and short-tailed pterodactyls.

The Archæopteryx differs from all known birds, not only in the structure of its tail, but in having two, if not three digits in the hand; but there is no trace of the fifth digit of the winged reptile.

The conditions under which the skeleton occurs are such, says Professor Owen, as to remind us of the carcass of a gull which had been a prey to some Carnivore, which had removed all the soft parts, and perhaps the head, nothing being left but the bony legs and the indigestible quill

CHAP. XXII.

FEATHERED ARCHEOPTERYX OF THE OOLITE. 453

feathers. But since Professor Owen's paper was read, Mr. John Evans, whom I have often had occasion to mention in the earlier chapters of this work, seems to have found what may indicate a part of the missing cranium. He has called

our attention to a smooth protuberance on the otherwise even surface of the slab of limestone which seems to be the cast of the brain or interior of the skull. Some part even of the cranial bone itself appears to be still buried in the matrix. Mr. Evans has pointed out the resemblance of this cast to one taken by himself from the cranium of a crow, and still more to that of a jay, observing that in the fossil the median line which separates the two hemispheres of the brain is visible.

To conclude, we may learn from this valuable relic how rashly the existence of Birds at the epoch of the Secondary rocks has been questioned, simply on negative evidence, and secondly, how many new forms may be expected to be brought to light in strata with which we are already best acquainted, to say nothing of the new formations which geologists are continually discovering.

454

ARYAN HYPOTHESIS AND CONTROVERSY. CHAP. XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGES AND SPECIES

COMPARED.

ARYAN HYPOTHESIS AND

CONTROVERSY-THE

RACES OF MANKIND CHANGE MORE SLOWLY THAN THEIR LANGUAGES-THEORY OF THE GRADUAL ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES-DIFFICULTY OF DEFINING WHAT IS MEANT BY A LANGUAGE AS DISTINCT FROM A DIALECT-GREAT NUMBER OF EXTINCT AND LIVING TONGUES-NO EUROPEAN LANGUAGE A THOUSAND YEARS OLD-GAPS BETWEEN LANGUAGES, HOW CAUSEDIMPERFECTION OF THE RECORD CHANGES ALWAYS IN PROGRESS STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE BETWEEN RIVAL TERMS AND DIALECTSCAUSES OF SELECTION EACH LANGUAGE FORMED SLOWLY IN A SINGLE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA MAY DIE OUT GRADUALLY OR SUDDENLYONCE LOST CAN NEVER BE REVIVED—MODE OF ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES AND SPECIES A MYSTERY SPECULATIONS AS TO THE NUMBER OF ORIGINAL LANGUAGES OR SPECIES UNPROFITABLE.

THE supposed existence, at a remote and unknown period,

of a language conventionally called the Aryan, has of late years been a favourite subject of speculation among German philologists, and Professor Max Müller has given us lately the most improved version of this theory, and has set forth the various facts and arguments by which it may be defended, with his usual perspicuity and eloquence. He observes that if we knew nothing of the existence of Latin,

if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost,-if tradition even was silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Wallachian, and Rhætian dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language, from which these six modern dialects derive their origin in common. Without

CHAP. XXIII. ARYAN HYPOTHESIS AND CONTROVERSY.

455

this supposition it would be impossible to account for their structure and composition, as, for example, for the forms of the auxiliary verb to be,' all evidently varieties of one common type, while it is equally clear that no one of the six affords the original form from which the others could have been borrowed. So also in none of the six languages do we find the elements of which these verbal and other forms could have been composed; they must have been handed down as relics from a former period, they must have existed in some antecedent language, which we know to have been the Latin.

But, in like manner, he goes on to show, that Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are also eight varieties of one common and more ancient type, and no one of them could have been the original from which the others were borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resemblance, as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan,

which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages. The people who spoke this unknown parent speech, of which so many other ancient tongues were offshoots, must have migrated at a remote era to widely separated regions of the old world, such as Northern Asia, Europe, and India south of the Himalaya.*

The soundness of some parts of this Aryan hypothesis has lately been called in question by Mr. Crawfurd, on the ground that the Hindoos, Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, and other people referred to as having derived not only words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source, belong each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is said, preserved their peculiar characters unaltered from the earliest dawn of history and tradition. If, therefore, no

* Max Müller, Comparative Mythology. Oxford Essays, 1856.