Old bones, that would be worthless to anybody else, become valuable to the geologist. There may be nothing picturesque or strikingly singular in their appearance. They may be too rotten or too fragile for the manufacturer; too sapless for the agriculturist; nay, too few or too far between to be of any commercial value at all. And yet bits of bones may be inscriptions of much value to the palæontologist. As every letter in the few lines incised on the famous Rosetta stone was a key to some passage in a forgotten language of the past, so every new bit of bone may be the key to some passage in that greater history of a greater past which geology unrolls. Many years ago—how time flies past—I met with a little patch of mammaliferous drift at Folkestone; I gathered every fragment of bone, every tooth, every shell, which the workmen's picks and spades exhumed, and most of what I could not determine myself at that time, Professor Owen, and my then living and active friend, Mr. Turner, looked over and named.Amongst the bones I then collected were two of form to me before unknown, and which I often since brought back to mind. Two—both fragments of horns—flat at the basal part, perfectly round towards the tip; no goat, nor antelope, nor deer, that I knew, had horns like them; and so those fragments were laid aside (not carelessly) for future thought and comparison. Shortly since in walking through the gallery of the British Museum, I visited the cases containing deers' remains, and there, at once I saw, not the counterparts, but what seemed to me the fac-similes of my bits of horns.
OJ287: Deciphering the “Rosetta stone of blazars★”
