310 Naturalist at Large 



of blocks of material, from both Haiti and the mainland. 

 Dr. Matthew was the most scholarly student of fossil 

 mammals which America has produced. He was for many 

 years at the American Museum of Natural History in New 

 York and then, preferring a more tranquil life, went to 

 the University of Cahfornia, where he died some years ago. 

 We carried on a sort of symposium in print on this matter 

 of distribution for some years. It was a pleasure to differ 

 from Matthew because he was so perfectly courteous and 

 invariably impersonal. In 1939 the New York Academy 

 of Sciences brought out a special publication, with an ex- 

 cellent portrait of my old friend, a reprinting of his Climate 

 and Evolution and my remarks {Special Publications of 

 the NeiD York Academy of Sciences, Vol. I, pp. i-xii, 

 1-223). The upshot of all this is that we shall probably 

 know a great deal more about this subject in the years to 

 come, as the paleontological evidence is piling up. Even 

 now we know more about the fossil animals of Cuba, 

 Jamaica, and Puerto Rico than we did a generation ago — 

 very much more — and not improbably more evidence will 

 be forthcoming in the future. Once I thought this was a 

 "pay your money and take your choice" problem, because 

 there is good argumentation both ways, but I feel now 

 that Matthew would have felt quite differently had he 

 lived to read Schuchert's book, published in 1935. 



