Chapter C: E. Dutton, Critical observations on theories of the earth’s (2)

In connection with taxonomic research came increasingly tangible evidence in favor of the law of evolution; investigators turned to the working out of phyletic series showing the actual record of the successive evolutionary changes that the various races had undergone. Coupled with this evolutionary evidence came an increased attention to the sequential occurrence in successive geologic strata, and the stratigraphic distribution of vertebrates became known with greater and greater detail. Then followed the assemblage of faunas, which brought the study of the fossil forms within the realm of historical geology, rather than being the mere phylogeny of a single race, and the value of vertebrate fossils as horizon markers became more and more appreciated by the stratigrapher. They serve to supplement the knowledge gained from the invertebrates, and in this connection are especially valuable in that they often give data concerning continental formations about which invertebrate paleontology is largely silent.

_Rise of Vertebrate Paleontology in Europe._

To those who had been nurtured in the belief in a relatively recent creation covering in its entirety a period of but six days, and occurring but four millenniums before the time of Christ, the appearance of the remains of creatures in the rocks, the like of which no man ever saw alive, must have given scope to the wildest imaginings concerning their origin and significance; for many believed that not only had no new forms been added to the world’s fauna since the creation, except possibly by hybridizing, but that none had become extinct save a very few through the agency of human interference. The supposition was, therefore, that such creatures as were thus discovered were still extant in some more remote fastnesses of the world. Thus, our second president, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote one of the first papers on American fossil vertebrates, published in 1798, discussed therein the remains of a huge ground-sloth which has since borne the name _Megalonyx jeffersoni_. Jefferson, however, described the great claws as pertaining to a huge leonine animal which he firmly believed was yet living among the mountains of Virginia.

Cuvier (1769–1832) has been spoken of as the founder of our science. His opportunity lay in the profusion of bones buried in the gypsum deposits of Montmartre within the environs of the city of Paris. Cuvier’s studies of these remains, done in the light of his very broad anatomical knowledge, enabled him to prepare the first reconstructions of fossil vertebrates ever attempted and to bring before the eyes of his contemporaries a world peopled with forms which were utterly extinct. That these creatures were no longer living, none was a better judge than Cuvier, for his prominence was such that material was sent him from all parts of the world, to which must be added that which he saw in his visits to the various museums of Europe. He felt it safe, therefore, to affirm the unlikelihood of any further discovery of unknown forms among the great mammals of the present fauna of our globe, and few indeed have been the additions since his day. To Cuvier is due not alone the masterly contribution to the sister sciences of comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology—the Ossements Fossiles (1812)—but he also announced the presence in continental strata of a series of faunas which showed a gradual organic improvement from the earliest such assemblage to the most modern, an idea of the most fundamental importance and one with which he is rarely credited. He believed in the sudden and complete extinction of faunas, and the facts then known were in accord with this idea, as no common genera nor transitional forms connected the creatures of the Paris gypsum with the mastodons, elephants, and hippopotami which the later strata disclosed. It is not remarkable, therefore, that Cuvier advanced his theory of catastrophism to account for these extinctions. He should not, however, according to Depéret, be credited with the idea of successive re-creations, such as that held by D’Orbigny and others, but of repopulation by immigration from some area which the catastrophe, be it flood or other destructive agency, failed to reach.

Cuvier was followed in Europe by a number of illustrious men, none of whom, however, with the exception of Sir Richard Owen, possessed his breadth of knowledge of comparative anatomy upon which to base their researches among the prehistoric. The more notable of them may be enumerated before going on to a discussion of the American contributions to the science.

They were, first, Louis Agassiz, a pupil of Cuvier and later a resident of America, whose researches on the fossil fishes of Europe are a monumental work, the result of ten years of investigation in all of the larger museums of that continent, and which appeared in 1833–43, while he was yet a young man. The fishes were practically the only fossil vertebrates to come within the scope of his investigations, for his later time was consumed in the study of glaciers and of recent marine zoology. Another student of these most primitive vertebrates who left an enduring monument was Johannes Mϋller. Huxley, Traquair, and Jaekel also did masterly work upon this group, while Smith Woodward of the British Museum is considered the highest living authority upon fossil fishes.

Of the Amphibia, the most famous foreign students were Brongniart, Jaeger, Burmeister, Von Meyer, and Owen, although Owen’s claim to eminence lies rather in the investigations of fossil reptiles which he began in 1839 and continued over a period of fifty years of remarkable achievement. Not only did he describe the dinosaurs of Great Britain in a series of splendidly illustrated monographs, but extended his researches to the curious reptilian forms from the Karroo formation of South Africa. It was to him, moreover, that the establishment of the true position of the famous _Archœopteryx_ as the earliest known bird and not a reptile is due. Von Meyer also enriched the literature of fossil reptiles, discussing exhaustively those occurring in Germany, while Huxley’s classic work on the crocodiles as well as on dinosaurs, and the labors of Buckland, Fraas, Koken, Von Huene, Gaudry, Hulke, Seeley, and Lydekker have added immensely to our knowledge of the group.

Of the birds, which at best are rare as fossils, our knowledge, especially of the huge flightless moas, is due largely again to Owen, and his realization of the systematic position of _Archœopteryx_ has already been mentioned.

The mammals were, perhaps, the most prolific source of paleontological research during the nineteenth century, for, as Zittel has said, Cuvier’s famous investigations on the fossil bones, mentioned above, not only contain the principles of comparative osteology, but also show in a manner which has never been surpassed how fossil vertebrates ought to be studied, and what are the broad inductions which may be drawn from a series of methodical observations. Such was Cuvier’s influence that until Darwin began to interest himself in mammalian paleontology the study of these forms was conducted entirely along the lines indicated by the French savant. This was seen in a large work, Osteology of Recent and Fossil Mammalia, by De Blainville, which, although not up to the standard set by the master, is nevertheless a notable contribution, as was also the Osteology prepared by Pander and D’Alton. A summary of the knowledge of the fossil Mammalia up to the year 1847 is contained in Giebel’s Fauna der Vorwelt, and Lydekker has done for the mammals in the British Museum what Smith Woodward did for the fishes, producing vastly more than the mere catalogue which the title implies.

The first work wherein the fossil mammals were treated genealogically was Gaudry’s Enchaînements du Monde Animal, written in 1878. Other work on the fossil Mammalia was done by Kaup, who described those from the Mainz basin and from Epplesheim near Worms whence came one of the most famous of prehistoric horses, the _Hipparion_; this horse, together with the remarkable proboscidean _Dinotherium_, was described by Von Meyer. One of the most remarkable discoveries, ranking in importance, perhaps, next to Montmartre, was that of the Pliocene fauna of Pikermi near Athens, Greece, first made known through the publications of A. Wagner of Munich and later, and much more extensively, through that of Gaudry (1862–1867). H. von Meyer was Germany’s best authority on fossil Mammalia. After his death the work was carried on by Quenstedt, Oscar Fraas, Schlosser, Koken, and Pohlig, among others.

In France, rich deposits of fossil mammals were discovered in the Department of Puy-de-Dôme, the Rhone basin, Sansan, Quercy, and near Rheims. These were described by a number of writers, notably Croizet and Jobert, Pomel, Lartet, Filhol, and Lemoine.

Rütimeyer of Bâle was one of the most famous European writers on mammalian paleontology, and his researches were both comprehensive and clothed in such form as to give them a high place in paleontological literature. He studied comparatively the teeth of ungulates, discussed the genealogy of mammals, and the relationships of those of the Old and New Worlds. He was an exponent of the law of evolution as set forth by Darwin, and his “genealogical trees of the Mammalia show a complete knowledge of all the data concerning the different members in the succession, and are amongst the finest results hitherto obtained by means of strict scientific methods of investigation” (Zittel, History of Geology and Palæontology, 1901). The mammals of the Swiss Eocene have been studied in much detail by Stehlin.

For Great Britain, the most notable contributors were Buckland in his Reliquiæ Diluvianæ; Falconer, co-author with Cautley on the Tertiary mammals of India; Charles Murchison, who wrote on rhinoceroses and proboscideans; and more recently Bush, Flower, Lydekker, Boyd Dawkins, L. Adams, and C. W. Andrews. But by far the most commanding figure of all was Sir Richard Owen, who for half a century stood without a peer as the greatest of authorities on fossil mammals. It was the Natural History of the British Fossil Mammals and Birds, published in 1846, that established Sir Richard’s reputation.

Russia has produced much mammalian material, especially from the Tertiary of Odessa and Bessarabia, and from the Quaternary of northern Russia and Siberia. These have been described mainly by J. F. Brandt, A. von Nordmann, but especially by Mme. M. Pavlow of Moscow.

Forsyth-Major discovered in 1887 a fauna contemporaneous with that of Pikermi in the Island of Samos in the Mediterranean.

One of the most remarkable recent discoveries of fossil localities was that announced in 1901 by Mr. Hugh J. L. Beadnell of the Geological Survey of Egypt and Doctor C. W. Andrews of the British Museum of London, of numerous land and sea mammals of Upper Eocene and Lower Oligocene age in northern Egypt. The exposures lay about 80 miles southwest of Cairo in the Fayûm district and are the sediments of an ancient Tertiary lake, a relic of which, Birket-el-Qurun, yet remains. These beds contained ancient Hyracoidea, Sirenia, and Zeuglodontia, but above all, ancestral Proboscidea which, together with those known elsewhere, enabled Andrews to demonstrate the origin and evolutionary features of this most remarkable group of beasts. This discovery in the Fayûm lends color to the belief that Africa may have been the ancestral home of at least five of the mammalian orders, those mentioned above, together with the Embrithopoda, a group unknown elsewhere. This theory had been advanced independently by Tullberg, Stehlin, and Osborn, before the discovery in Egypt.

Another European worker of pre-eminence who wrote more broadly than the faunal studies mentioned above was W. Kowalewsky. He discussed especially the evolutionary changes of feet and teeth in ungulates, a line of research afterward developed in greater detail by the Americans, Cope and Osborn.

South America has yielded series of rich faunas which have been exploited by the great Argentinian, Florentino Ameghino, and by the Europeans, Owen, Gervais, Huxley, Von Meyer, and more recently by Burmeister and Lydekker. Later exploration and research by Hatcher and Scott of North America will be discussed further on in this paper.

_Vertebrate Paleontology in America._

_Early Writers._—Having thus summarized paleontological progress in the Old World, we can turn to a consideration of the work done in the New, especially in the United States, because while the Old World investigation has been invaluable, a science of vertebrate paleontology, very complete both as to its zoological and geological scope and in the extent and value of published results, could be built exclusively upon the discoveries and researches made by Americans. The science of vertebrate paleontology may be said to have had its beginnings in North America with the activities of Thomas Jefferson, who, like Franklin, felt so strong an interest in scientific pursuits that even the graver duties of the highest office in the gift of the American people could not deter him from them. When in 1797 Jefferson came to be inaugurated as vice-president of the United States, he brought with him to Philadelphia not only his manuscript but the actual fossil bones upon which it was based. Again in 1801 he was greatly interested in the Shawangunk mastodon, despite heavy cares of state, and in 1808 made part of the executive mansion in Washington serve as a paleontological laboratory, displaying therein for study the bones of proboscideans and their contemporaries which the Big Bone Lick of Kentucky had produced. Jefferson’s work would not, perhaps, have been epoch-making were it not for its unique chronological position in the annals of the science.

Jefferson was followed by another man—this time one whose diverging lines of interest led him not into the realm of political service, but of art, for Rembrandt Peale possessed an enviable reputation among the early painters of America. Peale published in 1802 an account of the skeleton of the “mammoth,” really the mastodon, _M. americanus_, speaking of it as a nondescript carnivorous animal of immense size found in America. It was because of the form of the molar teeth that Peale said of it: “If this animal was indeed carnivorous, which I believe cannot be doubted, though we may as philosophers regret it, as men we cannot but thank Heaven that its whole generation is probably extinct.”

With the work of these men as a beginning, it is not strange that the more conspicuous Pleistocene fossils of the East should have attracted the attention of many subsequent writers in the first part of the nineteenth century, nor that the early papers to appear in the Journal should pertain to proboscideans or to the huge edentate ground-sloths and the aberrant zeuglodons whose bones frequently came to light. Therefore a number of men such as Koch, both Sillimans, J. C. Warren, and others made these forms their chief concern.

_Fossil Footprints._—Among the early writers who concerned themselves with these greater fossils was Edward Hitchcock, sometime president of Amherst College, and a geologist of high repute among his contemporaries. Hitchcock is, however, better and more widely known as the pioneer worker on a series of phenomena displayed as in no other place in the region in which he made his home. These are fossil footprints impressed upon the Triassic rocks of the Connecticut valley. It was in the Journal for the year 1836 (=29=, 307–340) that Hitchcock first called attention to the footmarks, although they had been known and discussed popularly for a number of years previous. James Deane, of Greenfield, was perhaps the first to appreciate the scientific interest of these phenomena, but deeming his own qualifications insufficient properly to describe them, he brought them to the attention of Hitchcock, and the interest of the latter never waned until his death in 1864. Hitchcock wrote paper after paper, publishing many of them in the Journal, again in his Final Report on the Geology of Massachusetts (1841), and later in quarto works, one in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the two others under the authority of the Commonwealth, the Ichnology in 1858, and the Supplement in 1865, the last being a posthumous work edited by his son, Charles H. Hitchcock.

Hitchcock’s conception of the track-makers was more or less imperfect because of the fact that for a long time but a few fragmentary osseous remains were known, either directly or indirectly associated with the tracks, while on the other hand the bird-like character of many of the latter and the discovery of huge flightless birds elsewhere on the globe suggested a very close analogy if not a direct relationship. Hence “bird tracks” they were straightway called, a designation which it has been difficult to remove, even though in 1843 Owen called attention to the need of caution in assuming the existence of so highly organized birds at so early a period, especially when large _reptiles_ were known which might readily form very similar tracks. The footprints are now believed to be very largely of dinosaurian origin, and dinosaurs whose feet corresponded in every detail with the footprints have actually come to light within the same geologic and geographic limitations. This of course refers to the bipedal, functionally three-toed tracks. Of the makers of certain of the obscurer of the quadrupedal trails we are as much in the dark to-day as were the first discoverers of a century ago, so far as demonstrable proof is concerned. We assume, however, that they were the tracks of amphibia and reptiles, beyond which we may not go with certainty.

Agassiz, writing in 1865 (Geological Sketches), says:

“To sum up my opinion respecting these footmarks, I believe that they
were made by animals of a prophetic type, belonging to the class of
reptiles, and exhibiting many synthetic characters. The more closely
we study past creations, the more impressive and significant do the
synthetic types, presenting features of the higher classes under the
guise of the lower ones, become. They hold the promise of the future.
As the opening overture of an opera contains all the musical elements
to be therein developed, so this living prelude of the creative work
comprises all the organic elements to be successively developed in the
course of time.”

Of those whose work was contemporaneous with that of Hitchcock, but one, W. C. Redfield, wrote on Triassic phenomena, and he concerned himself mainly with the fossil fishes of that time, his first paper on this subject appearing in 1837 in the Journal (=34=, 201), and the last twenty years later.

_Paleozoic Vertebrates._—Later the vertebrates of the Paleozoic began to attract attention, footprints from Pennsylvania being described by Isaac Lea, beginning in 1849, a notice of his first paper appearing in the Journal for that year (=9=, 124). Several papers followed on the reptile _Clepsysaurus_. Alfred King also wrote on the Carboniferous ichnites, his work slightly antedating that of Lea, but being less authoritative.

But by far the most illuminating of the mid-century writers on Paleozoic vertebrates was Sir William Dawson, a very large proportion of whose numerous papers relate to the Coal Measures of Nova Scotia and their contained plant and animal remains. In 1853 appeared Dawson’s first announcement, written in collaboration with Sir Charles Lyell, of the finding of the bones of vertebrates within the base of an upright fossil tree trunk at South Joggins. These bones were identified by Owen and Wyman as pertaining to a reptilian or amphibian to which the name _Dendrerpeton acadianum_ was given. Following this were several papers published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, London, describing more vertebrates and associated terrestrial molluscs. In 1863 Dawson summarized his discoveries in the Journal (=36=, 430–432) under the title of “Air-breathers of the Coal Period,” a paper which was expanded and published under the same title in the Canadian Naturalist and Geologist for the same year. Dawson also printed in the same volume the first account of reptilian(?) footprints from the coal. Thus from time to time there emanated from his prolific pen the account of further discoveries, both in bones and footprints, his final synopsis of the air-breathing animals of the Paleozoic of Canada appearing in 1895. The only other group of vertebrates which claimed his attention were certain whales, on which he occasionally wrote.

_Fishes._—The fossil fishes from the Devonian of Ohio found their first exponent in J. S. Newberry, appointed chief geologist of the second geological survey of Ohio, which was established in 1869. These fishes from the Devonian shales belonged for the greater part to the curious group of armored placoderms, the remains of which consist very largely of armor plates with little or no traces of internal skeleton. There was also found in association a shark, _Cladoselache_, of such marvelous preservation that from some of the Newberry specimens now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Bashford Dean has demonstrated the histology of muscle and visceral organs, in addition to the very complete skeletal remains.

Newberry’s work on these forms, begun in 1868, has been carried to further completion by Bashford Dean and his pupil L. Hussakof, as well as by C. R. Eastman. Newberry’s other paleontological work was with the Carboniferous fishes of Ohio, the Carboniferous and Triassic fishes of the region from Sante Fé to the Grand and Green rivers, Colorado, and on the fishes and plants of the Newark system of the Connecticut valley and New Jersey. He also discussed certain mastodon and mammoth remains, and those of the peccary of Ohio, _Dicotyles_.

_Joseph Leidy (1823–1891)._

We now come to a consideration of the work of Joseph Leidy, one of the three great pioneers in American vertebrate paleontology, for if we disregard the work of Hitchcock and others on the fossil footprints, few of the results thus far obtained were based upon the fruits of organized research. Leidy began his publication in 1847 and continued to issue papers and books from time to time until the year 1892, having published no fewer than 219 paleontological titles, and 553 all told. His earlier paleontological researches were exclusively on the Mammalia, which were then coming in from the newly discovered fossil localities of the West. The discovery of these forms, one of the most notable events in the history of our science, will bear re-telling.

The first announcement was made in 1847, when Hiram A. Prout of St. Louis published in the Journal (3, 248–250) the description of the maxillary bone of “_Palæotherium_” (= _Titanotherium proutii_)from near White River, Nebraska. This at once drew the attention of geologists and paleontologists to the Bad Lands, or Mauvaises Terres, which were to prove so highly productive of fossil forms. About the same time S. D. Culbertson of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, submitted to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia some fossils sent to him from Nebraska by Alexander Culbertson. These were afterward described by Leidy in the Proceedings of the Academy, together with the paleotheroid jaw, in addition to which three other collections which had been made were also placed at his disposal for study.

This aroused the interest of Doctor Spencer F. Baird of the Smithsonian Institution, who sent T. A. Culbertson to the Bad Lands to make further collections. The latter was successful in securing a valuable series of mammalian and chelonian remains. These, together with other specimens from the same locality, were sent to Leidy, for, as Baird remarked, Leidy, although only thirty years of age, was the only anatomist in the United States qualified to determine their nature. The outcome of Leidy’s study of this material was “The Ancient Fauna of Nebraska,” published in 1853, and constituting the most brilliant work which up to that time American paleontology had produced. Leidy’s determinations, which are in the main correct, are the more remarkable when it is realized that he had little recent osteological material for comparative study. The forms thus described by him were new to science, of a more generalized character than those now living, and yet their distinguished describer recognized, either at that time or a little later, their true relationship to the modern types. The extent of Leidy’s anatomical knowledge was almost Cuvierian, and Cuvier-like he established the fact of the presence of the rhinoceroses, then unheard of in the American fauna, from a few small fragments of molar teeth, an opinion shortly to be fully sustained through the finding of complete molars and the entire skull of the _same individual animal_.

Leidy next turned his attention to the huge edentates, which he studied exhaustively, publishing his results in the form of a memoir in 1855, two years after the appearance of the “Ancient Fauna.”

Extinct fishes of the Devonian of Illinois and Missouri and the Devonian and Carboniferous of Pennsylvania were made the subjects of his next researches, after which he described the peccaries of Ohio, and later, in a much larger and most important work, the Cretaceous reptiles of the United States (1865). Most of the fossils discussed in this last work are from the New Jersey Cretaceous marls and of them the most notable was the herbivorous dinosaur _Hadrosaurus_, the structure and habits of which, together with its affinities with the Old World iguanodons, Leidy described in detail. From Leidy’s descriptions and with his aid, Waterhouse Hawkins was enabled to restore a replica of the skeleton in a remarkably efficient way. This restoration for a long time graced the museum of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and there was a plaster replica of it in the United States National Museum. These, together with plaster replicas of _Iguanodon_ from the Royal College of Surgeons in London, gave to Americans their first real conceptions of members of this most remarkable group. The associated fossils from the New Jersey marls were chiefly crocodiles and turtles.

From 1853 to 1866 F. V. Hayden was carrying on a series of most energetic explorations in the West, especially in Nebraska and Dakota as then delimited, returning from each trip laden with fossils which were given to Leidy for determination. The results appeared in 1869 in Leidy’s Extinct Mammalian Fauna of Dakota and Nebraska, published as volume =7= of the Journal of the Philadelphia Academy. In this large volume no fewer than seventy genera and numerous species of forms, many of them new to science, were described, representing many of the principal mammalian orders; horses were, however, especially conspicuous. This last group led Leidy to the conclusion, afterward emphasized by Huxley, that North America was the home of the horse in geologic time, there being here a greater representation of different species than in any recent fauna of the world. Leidy’s interest in the horses, for the forwarding of which he made a large collection of recent material, extended over many years, as his first paper on the subject bears the date of 1847, the last that of 1890.

Next came the discovery of Eocene material from the vicinity of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, geologically older than the Nebraska and Dakota formations. This, together with specimens from the Green River and Sweetwater River deposits of Wyoming and the John Day River (Oligocene) of Oregon, was also referred to Leidy, and added yet more to the list of newly discovered species with which he had already become familiar in his earlier researches. The results of this study were published by the Hayden Survey in 1873, under the title “Contributions to the Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories.” This was the last of Leidy’s major works, but he continued up to the time of his death to report to the Academy concerning the various fossil forms that were submitted to him for identification. Of such reports the most important was one on the fossils of the phosphate beds of South Carolina, published in the Journal of the Academy in 1887.

As a paleontologist, Leidy ranks with Cope and Marsh high among those who enriched the American literature of the subject, but it must be remembered that this was but a single aspect of his many-sided scientific career, for he made many contributions of high order to botany, zoology, and general and comparative anatomy as well, nor did his knowledge and usefulness as an instructor of his fellow men keep within the limitations of these subjects.

_Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–1899)._

The sixth decade of the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the labors of several paleontologists who, like Leidy, were destined to raise the science of fossil vertebrates in America to the level of attainment of the Old World. They were, among others, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope. Of these the names of Marsh and Cope are linked together by the brilliance of their attainments, their contemporaneity, and the rivalry which the similarity of their pursuits unfortunately engendered. Marsh produced his first paleontological paper in 1862 (=33=, 278), Cope in 1864, but the latter died first, so that his life of research was shorter.

To Professor Marsh should be given credit for the first organized expedition designed exclusively for the collection of vertebrate remains, the results of which contain so much material that it has not yet entirely seen the light of scientific exposition. Marsh’s first trip to the West was in 1868, the first formal expedition being organized two years later. These expeditions, of which there were four, were privately financed except for the material and military escort furnished by the United States Government, and consisted of a personnel drawn entirely from the graduate or undergraduate body of Yale University. These parties explored Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, and Oregon, and returned laden with material from the Cretaceous and Tertiary formations of the West. Some of this is of necessity somewhat fragmentary, but type after type was secured which, with his exhaustive knowledge of comparative anatomy, enabled Marsh to announce discovery after discovery of species, genera, families, and even orders of mammals, birds, and reptiles which were unknown to science. The year 1873 saw the last of the student expeditions, and thereafter until the close of his life the work of collecting was done under Marsh’s supervision, but by paid explorers, many of whom had been his scouts and guides in the formal expeditions or had been especially trained by him in the East. In 1882, after fourteen years of the experience thus gained, Marsh was appointed vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, which relieved him in part of the personal expense connected with the collecting, although up to within a short time of his death his own fortune was very largely spent in enlarging his collections. After his connection with the Survey was established, Marsh had two main purposes in view in making the collections: (1) to determine the geological horizon of each locality where a large series of vertebrate fossils was found, and (2) to secure from these localities large collections of the more important forms sufficiently extensive to reveal, if possible, the life histories of each. Marsh believed that the material thus secured would serve as key or diagnostic fossils to all horizons of our western geology above the Paleozoic, a belief in which he was in advance of his time, for few of his contemporaries appreciated the value of vertebrates as horizon markers. The result of the fulfilment of his second purpose saw the accumulation of huge collections from all horizons above the Triassic and some Paleozoic and Triassic as well. These contained some very remarkable series, each of which Marsh hoped to make the basis of an elaborate monograph to be published under the auspices of the Survey. One can visualize the scope of his ambitions by the fact that no fewer than twenty-seven projected quarto volumes, to contain at least 850 lithographic plates, were listed by him in 1877. These covered, among other groups, the toothed birds (Odontornithes), Dinocerata, horses, brontotheres, pterodactyls, mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, monkeys, carnivores, perissodactyls and artiodactyls, crocodiles, lizards, dinosaurs, various birds, proboscideans, edentates and marsupials, brain evolution, and the Connecticut Valley footprints. Much was done towards the preparation of these memoirs, as evidenced by the long list of preliminary papers, admirably illustrated by woodcuts which were to form the text figures of the memoirs, which appeared with great regularity in the pages of the Journal for a period of thirty years. Of the actual memoirs, however, but two had been published at the time of Marsh’s death in 1899—the Odontornithes in 1880 and the Dinocerata in 1884. One must not overlook, however, the epoch-making Dinosaurs of North America, which was published by the Survey in 1896, although it was not in the form nor had it the scope of the proposed monographs. This was not due to lack of application, for Professor Marsh was an indefatigable worker, but rather to the fact that the program was of such magnitude as to necessitate a patriarchal life span for its consummation. As it is, Professor Marsh’s fame rests first upon his ability and intrepidity as a collector, ready himself to brave the very certain hardships and dangers which beset the field paleontologist in the pioneer days, and also by his judgment and command of men to secure the very adequate services of others and so to direct their endeavors that the results were of the highest value. The material witness to Marsh’s skill as a collector lies in the collections of the Peabody Museum at Yale and in the Marsh collection at the United States National Museum, the latter secured through the funds of the United States Geological Survey. Together they constitute what is possibly the greatest collection of fossil vertebrates in America, if not in the world; individually, they are second only to that of the American Museum in New York City, the result of the combined labors of Osborn and Cope and their very able corps of assistants.

As a scientist Marsh possessed in large measure that wide knowledge of comparative anatomy so necessary to the vertebrate paleontologist, and as a consequence was not only able to recognize affinities and classify unerringly, but also to recognize the salient diagnostic features of the form before him and in few words so to describe them as to render the recognition of the species by another worker relatively easy. The publication of hundreds of these specific diagnoses in the Journal constitutes a very large and valuable part of that periodical’s contribution to the advancement of our science. Marsh’s method of indicating forms by so brief a statement leaves much to be done, however, in the way of further description of his types, which in many instances were but partially prepared.

Yet another important service which Marsh rendered to science was the restoration of the creatures as a whole, made with the most painstaking care and precision through assembling the drawings of the individual bones. These restorations have become classic, embracing as they did a score or more of forms, of beast, bird, and reptile. They also were published first in the Journal, although they have subsequently been reproduced in text-books and other works the world over. Part of Marsh’s popular reputation, at least, which was second to that of no other American in his line, was due to his skill in attaining publicity, for his papers, of whatever extent, were carefully and methodically sent to correspondents in the uttermost parts of the earth, and thus the Marsh collection has reflected the fame of its maker.

_Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897)._

The third great name in American vertebrate paleontology, that of Edward Drinker Cope, stands out in sharp contrast with the other two, although in the range of his interests he was probably more nearly comparable with Leidy than with Marsh. The beginning of Cope’s scientific labors dates from 1859, the year made famous in the annals of science by the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species. It is not surprising, therefore, that matters evolutional should have interested him to the very end of his career. Cope was not merely a paleontologist, but was interested in recent forms, especially the three lower classes of vertebrates, to such an extent that his work therewith is highly authoritative and in some respects epoch-making. Thirty-eight years of almost continual toil were his, and the mere mass of his literary productions is prodigious, especially when one realizes that, unlike those of a writer of fiction, they were based on painstaking research and philosophical thought. The greater part of Cope’s life was spent in or near Philadelphia except for his western explorations, and he is best known as professor of geology and paleontology in the University of Pennsylvania, although he served other institutions as well.

Cope’s early work was among the amphibia and reptiles, his first paleontological paper, the description of _Amphibamus grandiceps_, appearing in 1865. This year he also began his studies of the mammals, especially the Cetacea, both living and extinct, from the Atlantic seaboard. The next year saw the beginning of his work on the material from the Cretaceous marls of New Jersey, describing therefrom one of the first carnivorous dinosaurs, _Lælaps_, to be discovered in America. In 1868 Cope began to describe the vertebrates from the Kansas chalk and three years later made his first exploration of these beds. This led to his connection with the United States Geological Survey of the Territories under Hayden, and to continued exploration of Wyoming and Colorado in 1872 and 1873. The material thus gained, consisting of fishes, mosasaurs, dinosaurs, and other reptiles, was described in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society as well as in the Survey Bulletins. In 1875 these results were summarized in a large quarto volume entitled “Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formations of the West.” Subsequent summers were spent in further exploration of the Bridger, Washakie, and Wasatch formations of Wyoming, the Puerco and Torrejon of New Mexico, and the Judith River of Montana. The material gathered in New Mexico proved particularly valuable, and led to the publication in 1877 of another notable volume entitled “Report upon the Extinct Vertebrata obtained in New Mexico by Parties of the Expedition of 1874.”

Material was now accumulating so fast as to necessitate the concentration of Cope’s own time on research, so that, while he continued to make brief journeys to the West, the real work of exploration was delegated to Charles H. Sternberg and J. L. Wortman, both of whom became subsequently very well known, the former as a collector whose active service has not yet ceased, the latter as an explorer and later an investigator of extremely high promise.

As early as 1865, Cope began no fewer than five separate lines of research which he pursued concurrently for the remainder of his career. On the fishes, he became a high authority in the larger classification, owing to his researches into their phylogeny, for which a knowledge of extinct forms is imperative. On amphibia, he wrote more voluminously than any other naturalist, discussing not only the morphology but the paleontology and taxonomy as well. In this connection must be mentioned not only Cope’s exploration and collections in the Permian of Ohio and Illinois, but especially the remains from the Texas Permian, first received in 1877, upon which some of his most brilliant results were based; these of course included reptilian as well as amphibian material. His third line of research, the Reptilia, is in part included in the foregoing, but also embraced the reptiles of the Bridger and other Tertiary deposits, those of the Kansas Cretaceous, and the Cretaceous dinosaurs.

Up to 1868 Leidy alone was engaged in research in the West, but that year saw the simultaneous entrance of Marsh and Cope into this new field of research, and their exploration and descriptions of similar regions and forms soon led to a rivalry which in turn developed into a most unfortunate series of controversies, mainly over the subject of priority. This resulted in a permanent rupture of friendship and the division of American workers into two opposing camps to the detriment of the progress of our science. This breach has now been happily healed, and for a number of years the degree of mutual good will and aid on the part of our workers has been of the highest sort.

The extent of the western fossil area, and particularly the explorations of three of Cope’s aids, Wortman in the Big Horn and Wasatch basins, Baldwin in the Puerco of New Mexico, and Cummins in the Permian of Texas, gave him so fruitful a field of endeavor that the occasion for jealous rivalry was largely removed. The most manifest result of Cope’s western work was the publication in 1883 of his Vertebrata of the Tertiary Formations of the West, which formed volume =3= of the quarto publications of the Hayden Survey. This huge book contains more than 1000 pages and 80 plates and has been facetiously called “Cope’s Bible.”

Cope’s philosophical contributions, which covered the domains of evolution, psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, began in 1868 with his paper on The Origin of Genera. In evolution he was a follower of Lamarck, and as such, with Hyatt, Ryder, and Packard, was one of the founders of the so-called Neo-Lamarckian School in America. Cope’s principal contribution, set forth in his Factors of Organic Evolution, is the idea of kinetogenesis or mechanical genesis, the principle that all structures are the direct outcome of the stresses and strains to which the organism is subjected. Weismann’s forcible attack on the transmission theory did not shake Cope’s faith in these doctrines, for he claimed that the paleontological evidence for the inheritance of such characters as are apparently the result of _individual_ modification was too strong to be refuted. Cope was more like Lamarck than any other naturalist in his mental make-up as well as his ideas. He was also, like Haeckel, given to working out the phylogeny of whatever type lay before him, and in many instances arrived marvellously near the truth as we now see it.

Associated for a while with A. S. Packard, Cope soon became chief editor and proprietor of the American Naturalist, which was for many years his main means of publication and thus served our science in a way comparable to the Journal. As Osborn says by way of summation:

“Cope is not to be thought of merely as a specialist in Paleontology.
After Huxley he was the last representative of the old broad-gauge
school of anatomists and is only to be compared with members of that
school. His life work bears marks of great genius, of solid and
accurate observation, and at times of inaccuracy due to bad logic or
haste and overpressure of work.... As a comparative anatomist he ranks
both in the range and effectiveness of his knowledge and his ideas
with Cuvier and Owen.... As a natural philosopher, while far less
logical than Huxley, he was more creative and constructive, his
metaphysics ending in theism rather than agnosticism.”

_1870–1880._

The seventh decade was productive of comparatively few great names in the history of our science, but two, J. A. Ryder and Samuel W. Williston, being notable contributors. The former produced but few papers and those between 1877 and 1892, yet they were of note and such was their influence that he is named with Hyatt, Packard, and Cope as one of the founders of the Neo-Lamarckian School of evolutionists in America. Ryder was a particular friend and a colleague of Cope, as they were both concerned with the back-boned animals, while the other two were invertebratists. Ryder wrote on mechanical genesis of tooth forms and on scales of fishes, also on the morphology and evolution of the tails of fishes, cetaceans, and sirenians, and of the other fins of aquatic types. He did, on the other hand, practically no systematic or descriptive work.

Williston, on the contrary, has had a long and varied career as an investigator and as an educator. Trained at Yale, he prepared for medicine, and much of his teaching has been of human anatomy, both at Yale and at the University of Kansas where he served for a number of years as dean of the Medical School. He is also a student of flies, and as such not only the foremost but indeed almost the only dipterologist in the United States. But it is with his work as a vertebrate paleontologist that we are chiefly concerned, and here again he stands among the foremost. His initial work and training in this department of science were with Marsh, for whom he spent many months in field work, collecting largely in the Niobrara Cretaceous of Kansas. He did, however, no research while with Marsh, owing to the latter’s disinclination to foster such work on the part of his associates. Williston began his publications in 1878 and has continued them until the present, working mainly with Cretaceous mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterodactyls. Of late, since his transference to the University of Chicago, where as professor of paleontology and director of the Walker Museum he has served since 1902, his interest has lain mainly among the Paleozoic reptiles and amphibia. Williston’s more notable works are American Permian Vertebrates and Water Reptiles of the Past and Present, wherein he sets forth his views of the phylogenesis and taxonomy of the reptilian class. He is at present at work on the evolution of the reptiles, a volume which is eagerly awaited by his colleagues. It is in morphology that Williston’s greatest strength lies and some of his most effective work on the mosasaurs has appeared in the Journal.

_1880–1900._

The next decade, that of 1880–1890, saw a number of notable additions to the workers in vertebrate paleontology: Henry F. Osborn, W. B. Scott, R. W. Shufeldt, J. L. Wortman, George Baur, F. A. Lucas, and F. W. True. Shufeldt is our highest authority on the osteology of birds, both recent and extinct, having recently described all of the extinct forms contained in the Marsh collection; True wrote of Cetacea; Lucas of marine and Pleistocene mammals and birds, and has also written popular books on prehistoric life. Lucas’s greatest service, however, lies in the museums, where he has manifested a genius second to none in the installation of mute evidences of living and past organisms. Wortman was for a time associated with Cope, later with Osborn in the American Museum, again at the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, and finally at Yale in research on the Bridger Eocene portion of the Marsh collection. His work has been chiefly the perfection of field methods in vertebrate paleontology, and as a special investigator of Tertiary Mammalia, treating the latter largely from the morphologic and taxonomic standpoints. Wortman’s Yale results on the carnivores and primates of the Eocene, as yet unfinished, were published in the Journal in 1901–1904.

William B. Scott is a graduate of Princeton, and has spent thirty-four years in her service as Blair Professor of Geology and Paleontology. His first publication, in 1878, issued in conjunction with Osborn and Speir, described material collected by them in the Eocene formations of the West, and since that time Scott’s research has been entirely with the mammals, on which he is one of our highest authorities. His most notable works have been a History of Land Mammals of the Western Hemisphere, 1913, and the results of the Patagonian expeditions by Hatcher, which are published in a quarto series in conjunction with W. J. Sinclair, although they are the authors of separate volumes, Scott’s work being mainly on the carnivores and edentates of the Santa Cruz formation. It is as a systematist in research and as an educator that Scott has attained his highest usefulness.

The man who, next to the three pioneers, has attained the highest reputation in vertebrate paleontologic research, is Henry Fairfield Osborn. Graduate of Princeton in the same class that produced Scott, Osborn served for a time as professor of comparative anatomy in that institution, and in 1891 was called to New York to organize the department of zoology in Columbia University and that of vertebrate paleontology in the American Museum of Natural History. He had, early in his career, gone west in company with Professor Scott, and had collected material from the Eocene formation of Wyoming, upon which they based their first joint paper in 1878, Osborn’s first independent production, a memoir on two genera of Dinocerata, appearing in 1881. A number of papers followed, on the Mesozoic Mammalia, on Cope’s tritubercular theory, and on certain apparent evidences for the transmission of acquired characters. It was, however, with his acceptance of the New York responsibilities, especially at the American Museum, that Osborn’s most significant work began. Aided first by Wortman and Earle, later by W. D. Matthew and others, he has built up the greatest and most complete collection of fossil vertebrates extant; its value, however, was largely enhanced through the purchase of the private collection of Professor Cope, which of course included a large number of types. The American Museum collection thus contains not only a vast series of representative specimens from every class and order of vertebrates, secured by purchase or expedition from nearly all the great localities of the world, but an exhibition series of skulls and partial and entire skeletons and restorations which no other institution can hope to equal. Based upon this wonderful material is a large amount of research, filling many volumes, published for the greater part in the bulletin and memoirs of the Museum. This research is not only the product of the staff, including Walter Granger, Barnum Brown, W. D. Matthew, and W. K. Gregory, but also of a number of other American and some foreign paleontologists as well.

Professor Osborn’s own work has been voluminous, his bibliography from 1877 to 1916 containing no fewer than 441 titles, ranging over the fields of paleontology,—which of course includes the greater number—geology, correlation and paleogeography, evolutionary principles exemplified in the Mammalia, man, neurology and embryology, biographies, and the theory of education.

In paleontology, Osborn’s researches have been largely with the Reptilia and Mammalia, partly morphological, but also taxonomic and evolutional. Faunistic studies have also been made of the mammals. Of his published volumes the most important are, first, the Age of Mammals (1910), in which he treats not of evolutionary series of phylogenies, but of faunas and their origin, migrations, and extinctions, and of the correlation of Old and New World Tertiary deposits and their contents. Men of the Old Stone Age (1916) is an exhaustive treatise and is the first full and authoritative American presentation of what has been discovered up to the present time throughout the world in regard to human prehistory. In his latest volume, The Origin and Evolution of Life (1917), Osborn presents a new energy conception of evolution and heredity as against the prevailing matter and form conceptions. In this volume there is summed up the whole story of the origin and evolution of life on earth up to the appearance of man. This last book is novel in its conceptions, but it is too early as yet to judge of the acceptance of Osborn’s theses by his fellow workers in science.

Since the death of Professor Marsh, Osborn has served as vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, and has in charge the carrying through to completion of the many monographs proposed by his distinguished predecessor. One of these, that on the horned dinosaurs, has been completed by Hatcher and Lull (1907), another on the stegosaurian dinosaurs has been carried forward by C. W. Gilmore of the United States National Museum, while under Osborn’s own hand are the memoirs on the titanotheres (aided by W. K. Gregory), the horses, and the sauropod dinosaurs. Of these, the first, when it shall have been completed, promises to be the most monumental and exhaustive study of a group of fossil organisms ever undertaken.

As a leader in science, a teacher and administrator, Professor Osborn’s rank is high among the leading vertebratists. He is remarkably successful in his choice of assistants and in stimulating them in their productiveness so that their combined results form a very considerable share of the later literature in America.

The ninth decade ushered in the work of a valuable group of students, of whom John Bell Hatcher should be mentioned in particular, as his work is done. Graduate of Yale in 1884, he spent a number of years assisting his teacher, Professor Marsh, mainly in the field, collecting during that time, either for Yale or for the United States Geological Survey, an enormous amount of very fine material, especially from the West, although he also collected in the older Tertiary and Potomac beds near Washington. In the West he secured no fewer than 105 titanothere skulls, explored the Tertiary, Judith River, and Lance formations, collected and in fact virtually discovered the remains of the Cretaceous mammals and of the horned dinosaurs which he was later privileged to describe. He then (1893) went to Princeton, which he served for seven years, his principal work being explorations in Patagonia for the E. and M. Museum, one direct result of which was the publication of a large quarto on the narrative of the expedition and the geography and ethnography of the region. Going to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1900, Hatcher carried forward the work of exploration and collecting begun for that institution by Wortman, and as a partial result prepared many papers, the principal ones being memoirs on the dinosaurs _Haplocanthosaurus_ and _Diplodocus_. In 1903, with T. W. Stanton of the United States Geological Survey, Hatcher explored the Judith River beds and together they settled the vexatious problem of their age, the published results appearing in 1905, after Hatcher’s death. His last piece of research, begun in 1902 and continued until his death in 1904, was an elaborate monograph on the Ceratopsia, one of the many projected by Marsh. Of this memoir Hatcher had completed some 150 printed quarto pages, giving a rare insight into the anatomy of these strange forms. The final chapters, however, which were based very largely upon Hatcher’s own opinions, had to be prepared by another hand.