enjoying our noon rest and smoke after luncheon, Speir, who did not 

 like sitting still, got up and began to poke about in the little gullies 

 and washouts around us. Presently, he called out that he had found 

 something and asked us to come and look at it. It proved to be a well 

 exposed skull, very much smaller than that of the elephantine beast 

 upon which we were at work, but, if it had been made to order from 

 my specifications, it could hardly have reproduced more accurately my 

 hypothetical creature of the evening before. Many palaeontological 

 predictions have been verified by subsequent discovery, but never, I 

 think, was there one where verification followed so hard upon the 

 heels of prediction, as on that wonderful morning, which, like "the 

 proud Ides of Quintilis," should be "marked evermore in white." 



I have often told the story of that day in classroom and public lec- 

 tures, especially in discussions of evolution, and have always felt obliged 

 to caution my hearers that prediction of that sort is no very wonderful 

 feat, that it requires no stroke of genius, but can be made by any com- 

 petent student of a particular group of animals. Often our predictions 

 go astray because made from erroneous premises and, often, the veri- 

 fication waits long on the progress of discovery, but there are many 

 cases in which the creature, at first hypothetical, has actually been 

 found. I had the great pleasure of verifying a prediction made by my 

 friend. Dr. Max Schlosser, of Munich, from material collected by our 

 party in Utah in 1886. 



Our newly discovered treasures were described and figured in a paper 

 which I pubUshed in the following April; the big creature proved to 

 be a new species of U intatherium and I named it U. alticeps, while the 

 small skull, which verified my prediction, belonged to a new genus and 

 species and to it I gave the name Elachoceras parvum. It is a very sur- 

 prising thing that these two skulls were not discovered long before we 

 got them; they lay one on each side of the main road and within a 

 few feet of it. I could have sat on my horse and, without moving a 

 step, have tossed a biscuit, first on one head and then on the other. 

 All the exploring and collecting parties, which had examined that part 

 of Wyoming, Hayden's, Marsh's, Cope's, not to mention our own ex- 

 peditions of 1877 and '78, had passed between those skulls, not once 

 merely, but many times, and not till "Whitey," the mail driver, and 

 his passenger. Dr. Whytock, stopped to examine the spot on August 

 30, 1885, did any one suspect the existence of these beautiful fossils. 



In order to get out the large skull, we had to make an immense hole, 

 five or six feet square and three feet, or more in depth. The pieces of 



[ 168 n 



