Page:The Zoologist, 1st series, vol 1 (1843).djvu/159

Rh was a fool:—"Dr. Linnæus has said it, and will you dispute his veracity?" Peter submitted, and for years swallows continued to dash desperately into the ponds when they beheld the first symptoms of winter, and there clinging to the submerged stems of rushes, they stuck their beaks into the mud, pointed their forked tails to the heavens, and calmly and philosophically defied the wintry winds that were raging above, and the hungry eels that were wriggling below. We now begin to think that Linneus was wrong; and that swallows do fly southward as Peter Collinson imagined. Why then should we deny the liability to err? Why should we say—"It is useless to enquire; it is idle to adduce facts; the question is set at rest for ever: the creature is a reptile, a genus or subgenus of a well-known family of lizards: Cuvier has said it, and will you dispute his veracity? "

There are two points on which I dissent from this dictum:—1. I consider the pterodactyles to have constituted a large and most remarkable group of animals, equal in extent to the orders of Linneus, and much more diversified in economy than many of these, since it contained carnivorous, piscivorous and insectivorous animals. 2. I consider they were mammalious and clothed with hair. There is still another point in connexion with pterodactyles, at which I merely hint as a matter of surmise. It is this; that the race may yet probably exist; that representatives of the fossil pterodactyles may yet be found amongst the bats which abound within the tropics. Had we found the opossum of Stonesfield in a perfect state, with the curious history of its marsupial structure made manifest, anterior to the discovery of America and Australia, we should have thought it a being of another system, so different is an opossum from the animals of the Old World; but those rich regions have supplied the connecting links, and it is more than possible they will do the same for the pterodactyles. Species and even genera become extinct, but it rarely happens that a vast group like the pterodactyles is wholly lost, and left without a representative.

Note on the Pterodactyles. —

"It is probable also that the pterodactyles had the power of swimming, which is so common in reptiles, and which is now possessed by the Pteropus Pselaphon, or vampire bat of the island of Bonin. Thus like Milton's fiend, all-qualified for all services and all elements, the creature was a fit companion for the kindred reptiles which swarmed in the seas or crawled on the shores of a turbulent planet.