much fa-ter [farther] than we could. However, we were able to follow by its dismal cries in the distance. We followed it half a mile, when it passed out of our hearing. The next day a company went in pursuit and trailed it by the blood on the grass. It was followed three miles to Jumper Slough, which it entered, and all trace of it was lost. Where it passed down the bank it left several well-formed tracks in the mud. One of the best was cut out with a spade and after drying was taken to Selma, where it is in the possession of Mr. Snodgrass.” From the San Francisco Chronicle.     It is not entirely safe to assume that the strange winged monster which is reported to inhabit the swamps and marshes in the vicinity of Selma, in Fresno county, is a variety of the guascutus horribius, as might be expected, nor that the creature has been projected from the fertile imagination of a newspaper correspondent. There certainly is some kind of a winged animal there which devours chickens and other domestic fowl—not simply kills and eats them, but crushes and mangles them.     In addition to this mute testimony, a number of witnesses, seemingly reputable, have actually seen two great flying animals, of a kind entirely strange to them, circling through the air, uttering their weird and discordant cries, and swooping toward the ground, while another witness has shot at and wounded one of these birds, if they be birds, and has secured the imprint of the imprint of the creature’s foot in the mud.

One of two things is true, either all these witnesses are telling a falsehood, intentionally, or as the result of self-deception, or they have come upon a survival of an earlier and prehistoric age. In this latter hypothesis there is nothing intrinsically improbable. We are accustomed to think of geologic ages as being clearly defined, accurately limited periods of time, as though one ended all at once and another began immediately upon its conclusion, as do the lines or figures representing these eras in the the text books on geology and kindred sciences. The idea is erroneous in the extreme. No one can say that at a certain time one era ended and another began. On the contrary the best authorities agree that one era lapped over upon another ; that the records show that an animal or plant of one period is often found in another, and that survival of types of forms is not to be unexpected.     If then, the marshes of Fresno have given shelter for centuries to forms of animal life with which we are unacquainted, there is nothing abnormal about it, however, strange it be. It will be an event in ornithology if these birds can be classified, especially if they are found to belong to a palaozoic age, beyond that it will prove nothing except that there are stranger things in earth and heaven than are dreamt off [of] in our philosophy. From— The Sun. (New York [N.Y.]), 16 Aug. 1891. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.