and continued that work, which I found extremely interesting, for 

 twenty years. 



Osborn and I formed an ambitious plan to write a comprehensive 

 work on American Fossil Mammals, which the Macmillan Company 

 had agreed to publish and had even gone so far as to advertise it as "in 

 preparation." We cherished this scheme hopefully for twenty years and 

 did a lot of work on it, but had to abandon it eventually. To perform 

 this great task intelligently, we found it necessary to acquaint ourselves 

 thoroughly with the fossil mammals of Europe. For this purpose and 

 also to fit himself still better for his courses in comparative anatomy, 

 Osborn spent the year 1886 in Europe, chiefly at Munich. After he had 

 taken over the department of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the American 

 Museum and had begun the great series of collecting expeditions for 

 which that Museum is famous, new material came in such a flood that 

 we were fairly swamped in it. Our chapters had to be rewritten many 

 times and, even then, were antiquated before they were finished. We 

 reluctantly came to the conclusion that the great work of synthesis 

 would have to be left to younger men. 



The story of my quarrel with Professor Marsh is a long and compli- 

 cated tale, with many ramifications. This is no place to narrate it all 

 at length, though I possess all the necessary letters and documents and 

 some day I hope to write out the story in full, but whether it will ever 

 be published, is doubtful. The quarrel began in a concealed sort of 

 way, when, under cover of the Yale-Princeton football game of 1885, 

 I went to New Haven to attend a meeting of Marsh's assistants, who 

 were determined to take active steps toward unmasking the great 

 palaeontologist, but this meeting came to nothing; the great explosion 

 was deferred for four years. Of this I shall speak briefly in its proper 

 order. 



All my spare time was devoted to our magnum opus, to which a 

 necessary preliminary was the compilation of a complete bibliography 

 of our fossil mammals and, for this purpose, I did a great deal of work 

 in the fine library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. 

 In compiling the bibliography I found great entertainment in going 

 through the voluminous literature on the American Mastodon, much 

 of which was incredibly absurd. In particular, a German explorer found 

 a remarkably complete Mastodon skeleton near the Missouri River and 

 took it to London, where he exhibited it as the "Leviathan of Holy 

 Writ." The British Museum bought and remounted it and it is dis- 

 played in South Kensington still. So amusing did I find much of this 



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