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 _outre_, 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
type, if not altogether so huge of bulk, as those with which the Seven
Champions of Christendom used to do battle; and here are we introduced
to birds of the Liassic ages that were scarce less gigantic than the roc
of Sinbad the Sailor. They are fraught with strange meanings these
footprints of the Connecticut. They tell of a time far removed into the
by-past eternity, when great birds frequented by myriads the shores of a
nameless lake, to wade into its shallows in quest of mail-covered fishes
of t