io To the River Plate and Back 



a letter to Professor Edwin Ray Lankester explaining 

 the matter, and not long afterwards received through 

 Dr. Lankester from the Trustees of the Museum in 

 London a communication, in which they expressed their 

 cordial appreciation of the generous thought of Mr. 

 Carnegie, further stating that a suitable place for the 

 display of the specimen would be found, and requesting 

 the writer to immediately proceed with the undertaking. 

 Never before had just such a task as this been 

 attempted. The skeleton measured eighty-four and 

 a half feet in length. The bones, though hard, were 

 in places delicate and extremely fragile. Difficulties 

 in the use of materials were encountered. The great 

 vertebrae, full of deep pits and crowded with slender 

 projections, presented many problems in treatment 

 which were vexatious. When at last the molds had 

 been made, and casts of the more than two hundred 

 bones had been secured, there remained the work of 

 designing a steel frame upon which they might be 

 assembled in their relative positions, and of providing 

 plans for a base upon which the whole structure might 

 rest. Professor J. B. Hatcher, Mr. A. S. Coggeshall, 

 and their assistants were tireless. At last the greatest 

 difficulties were surmounted. At that time there was 

 no unoccupied room in the building of the Institute 

 sufficiently large to permit us to erect the specimen 

 within its walls. With great courtesy the managers 

 of the Western Pennsylvania Exposition Society allowed 

 us the use of one of their vacant halls, and there we set 

 up the great skeleton preparatory to taking it down 

 again and shipping it to London. Before the work 

 was quite completed Professor Hatcher was suddenly 

 seized by a fatal illness and passed over into the endless 

 silence. It fell to the writer, who had taken an active 



