Shortly before the prospectus was issued there appeared in one of the best-known scientific journals an illustration and article descriptive of the petrified bird's foot which had been found in the Bondavara mine. The article was signed "Doctor Felicius."
All the savants were excited. "We must see this impression!" they cried.
The discoverer had given to the creature, whose foot-mark had remained unalterably impressed upon the tender (!) coal, the learned name of Protornithos lithanthracoides.
"Ho, ho!" exclaimed the united bodies of geologists, physiologists, professors, philosophers, artisans, and artesian-well borers, "that is indeed a long word!"
One set of learned men declared the thing to be possible, another denied its possibility.
And why was it not possible? Because at the period of coal-formations neither birds nor any one of the mammalia could exist, or did exist, in the bowels of the earth. There we find only traces of plants, of mussels, of fish sometimes.
And why is it credible? Because in these days we make discoveries every day. Humboldt declared that in the antediluvian world no apes had ever lived, for the reason that the fossil of an ape had never been found. Since then one fossil ape has been discovered in England, in France three of the Ourang species.
By degrees the strife raged in every newspaper; it was taken up in English, French, German, and American publications. At last it was proposed that the matter should be referred to a commission of five well-known professors, to whom the petrifaction should be submitted, and who should decide the question in dispute. Doctor Felicius offered one thousand ducats to the one who would prove that his bird's claw was not a bird's claw.
The tribunal of the five learned judges examined the petrifaction with microscopical attention, and after a long sitting brought in a unanimous verdict that the impression was not made by the claw of a Protornithos, but was that of a leaf belonging to the plant Annularia longefolia; in fact, there could be no question of the bird species, as the specimen of coal produced was not brown coal, but the purest black, in which coal formation it was not possible for even a bird to exist.
Doctor Felix Kaulmann quietly paid the thousand ducats, and thanked the whole republic of professors for the service they had rendered to the Bondavara coal; such an advertisement could not have been obtained at an expense of forty thousand ducats. Let people say that the Protornithos was a humbug—who cares? The reputation of the Bondavara coal was firmly established on the best scientific grounds.