28
In February, 1816, Dr. Thomas Thomson printed, in the
Annals of Philosophy, that Dr. Redman Coxe, Professor of
Chemistiy at Philadelphia, in the United States, had
informed him that he contemplated galvanism as a probable
means of establishing telegraphic communications, and
nominally by the evolution of gases from water. Coxe
promised to follow up the idea, but he added that it would
demand time. The Abbé Moigno, at Paris, states in both
editions of his Traité de Télégraphie électrique (1849 and
are quarried. He got here organic fossils for his collections. Already in 1810 he had described the interesting animal which he, from the likeness of its head with that of a bird, called Ornithocephalus, and which he considered to be a mammal, a bat, from which opinion, however, Cuvier differed, taking it to be a reptile, and calling it Pterodactylus. Later Soemmerring described a similar animal, which be named Ornithocephalus brevirostris, the former being longirostris; also two others, Crocodilus priscus, and Lacerta gigantea. The first described Ornithocephalus remained as one of the most remarkable objects in the Museum at Munich, where Agassiz, when studying medicine at that place, was, in 1828, first led to the study of fossils, in which department he subsequently succeeded in accomplishing so much. A cast in plaster of Paris of the Ornithocephalus longirostris, which Soemmerring had shown me in 1819 in Frankfort, where he then lived for a time, I have now seen again in the British Museum in London, besides other fossils that were in Soemmerring’s possession.
