Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/848

328 us to form some kind of an idea of the curious appearance of the fauna of that epoch. The Stuttgart Museum is also one of those in which the has is best represented; and it contains the Holzmaden collection, which is celebrated for its entire skeletons of reptiles. M. Fraas had the kindness a few years ago to conduct me to the locality of the fossils and show me the condition in which they were discovered. They were generally incrusted by the rock, and only bulges were perceptible, which taught nothing to the untrained eye. But my guide was able to divine where the head, the limbs, and the tail could be found, and could even tell me what kind of an animal was concealed in the stone. Those complete skeletons which adorn many museums are brought out by the skillful use of engravers' tools. The Stuttgart collection contains several icthyosauri with their young within their bellies. As a rule, the head is turned toward the anus, as with other vivipares; but I saw one fossil containing two young turned toward the head, and another that had six, turned in as many directions. Is it supposable that the icthyosaurus had sometimes one young one, like the salamander, and sometimes several, like the viper and the slow-worm?

Munich has several important collections under the care of Professor Zittel; that of ammonites, for instance, which is said to be the most complete in existence, and the series of admirable preparations of fossil sponges, the skeletons of which M. Zittel has isolated by steeping them in acidulated water. I was pleased to see there the Pikermi fossils which Wagner first made known. But the principal curiosity of the Paleontological Museum of Munich is the collection of lithographic stones from the oölite of Solenhofen. If we have to go to Stuttgart to study the trias and the lias, it is to Munich we must go to admire the oölite. All geologists are aware that the Solenhofen stones were originally mud deposited on a shore where the inhabitants of the sea and of the continent met. In this mud the most diverse and most delicate beings of the oölite have been preserved with a wonderful perfection. There are to be found in it acalephs, a multitude of crustaceans, insects that have preserved the reticulations of their wings, their feet, and their antennæ, and ammonites with their aptychus, and fishes in course of transition from the ganoid to the teleostean state. Here especially we come to study flying reptiles. They present themselves in all positions. We can see here also the little compsognathus which, long before the discovery of entire iguanodons in Belgium, enabled us to understand the gait of those dinosaurians. The paleontologist might dream, while contemplating this collection of beings, that he could imagine himself in the midst of the secondary period almost as much as if it were still with us; and after seeing it we may readily believe that the day will come when our successors shall have a clear idea of the grand history of past ages.

Vienna, which has long been famous for its life and gayety, has