230 Naturalist at Large 



least as many more represented by fragments too incomplete 

 to stand as types of described species. 



After suffering a good deal of amateur blackmail and 

 threats of violence from a neighbor who claimed to have 

 a lease on the abandoned farm, we finally found that it was 

 owned by a bank in Macon, Georgia, which had taken it by 

 foreclosure many, many years before. I bought the forty 

 acres around the dig, and now have deeded them to the 

 University of Florida, which is located at Gainesville only 

 forty-five miles away. 



The digging is finished for the time being, and we have 

 built John Henry Miller a little house there of an archi- 

 tecture typical of the country. Our house has a room at one 

 end for a kitchen, a "breezeway" in the middle, and a room 

 beyond the breezeway in which to sleep. John Henry has 

 planted wild verbena around the yard, and our friends 

 Archie and Margie Carr, of the Department of Biology at 

 the University, have brought out bulbs and seeds. During 

 the last year when I have been rather on the feeble side 

 with a nervous and irritable heart, I could sit in the shade 

 and watch the butterflies visit the flowers in the yard, listen 

 to the earthy Elizabethan speech of my friends digging near 

 at hand, and look forward each day to a cornpone, side 

 meat, and collard greens, or a gopher-turtle stew prepared 

 by John Henry's master hand. 



From small beginnings the Thomas Farm has grown so 

 that now it is the most important and most famous vertebrate 

 fossil locality in the Eastern United States, and I have a 

 hunch that a generation hence scientists are going to say 

 that spotting and opening the Thomas Farm dig was a good 

 job. 



