FOSSIL PEDIGREES 91 



ture," says Bather, "as of cloven hoofs and horns with a rumi- 

 nant stomach, were observed, but as Cuvier himself insisted, 

 the laws based on such facts were purely empirical." (*Sa- 

 ence, Sept. 17, 1920, p. 258.) The palaeontologist, then, is 

 justified in making use of correlation for the purpose of re- 

 constructing a whole animal out of a few fragmentary remains, 

 but to look for anything like photographic precision in such 

 ''restorations" of extinct forms is to manifest a more or less 

 complete ignorance of the nature and scope of the empirical 

 laws, upon which they are based. 



The imprudence of taking these "reconstructions" of extinct 

 forms too seriously, however, is inculcated not merely by theo- 

 retical considerations, but by experience as well. Even in the 

 case of the mammoth, a comparatively recent form, whose 

 skeletal remains had been preserved more completely and per- 

 fectly than those of other fossil types, the discovery of a com- 

 plete carcass buried in the ice of the Siberian "taiga" on the 

 Beresovka river showed the existing restorations to be false in 

 important respects. All, without exception, stood in need of 

 revision, proving, once and for all, the inadequacy of fossil 

 remains as a basis for exact reconstruction. E. Pfizenmayer, a 

 member of the investigating expedition, comments on the fact 

 as follows: "In the light of our present knowledge of the mam- 

 moth, and especially of its exterior, the various existing at- 

 tempts at a restoration need important corrections. Apart from 

 the many fanciful sketches intended to portray the exterior of 

 the animal, all the more carefully made restorations show the 

 faults of the skeleton, hitherto regarded as typical, on which 

 they are based, especially the powerful semicircular and up- 

 ward-curved tusks, the long tail, etc. 



"As these false conceptions of the exterior of the mammoth, 

 both written and in the form of pictures, are contained in all 

 zoological and palseontological textbooks, and even in scien- 

 tific monographs, it seems necessary to construct a more nearly 

 correct picture, based on our present knowledge. I have ven- 

 tured on this task, because as a member of the latest expe- 



