124 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



get them in their present condition, and though I was very anxious to 

 show you the whole skeleton, it was a physical impossibility. It will 

 take another month to scrub ofp the tenacious blue shale in which 

 they were buried. The whole animal was originally present. It lay 

 on its back, every bone in its natural position, though sadly broken 

 by the disintegration of the shale ; one fore limb, from the humerus 

 outward, and the end of the skull were cut off by the wash. It there- 

 fore gives me great pleasure to introduce you to the fellow who has 

 been so cruelly misrepresented during his absence. He will tell you 

 the truth, and as I hope will be a warning to paleontologists to know 

 what they are talking about before they rush into print and give a 

 false representation of one of God's creatures, as it may turn up, as 

 this has done, to make their labor vain, and give young paleontolo- 

 gists a chance to rise in the world on the mistakes of their prede- 

 cessors. 



You will find this turtle very unlike the one Professor Cope's imagi- 

 nation pictured; and though it boasts of lying in its rocky tomb 

 undisturbed while more recent history was being made — in fact, be- 

 fore and since the vast sediments in ocean and lake were laid down 

 that make up half the strata that compose the bulk of the Rocky 

 Mountains ; before this material was elevated in mighty ranges and 

 towering peaks, or the Colorado river had with its tools of sand and 

 gravel carved out of the solid rock the Grand Canyon, 300 miles long 

 and 6000 feet deep — yet in spite of the vast lapse of time since it 

 lived it is still a tortoise, resembling in many particulars the Medi- 

 terranean genus Thallassocheyles, fully carrying out the law of the 

 "persistence of type." 



So after these many years of doubt and uncertainty as to his struc- 

 ture Mr. Protostega comes before you in his own joerson to prove to 

 you that scientific literature is full of "science falsely so called." My 

 discoveries have often proved that when men of science guess on the 

 structure of an animal which they only know in part they usually 

 guess wrong. Our works on paleontology are full of such errors as 

 Cope made, proving that the ablest minds, when they draw on their 

 imagination for scientific material, drop into the same class to which 

 Professor Hicks belongs. When they try to force facts to carry out 

 some preconceived theory of their own, as to how nature should do 

 things, the unexpected is likely to happen ; the animals themselves 

 may come forward to prove that man cannot describe correctly an 

 animal he never has seen. It is said the Japanese can take our most 

 complicated machinery to pieces and build as many exact duplicates 

 as they wish, but they cannot invent. So all a paleontologist can do 

 is to give a description of what he has seen. To go beyond this is 

 guesswork and of little or no value. 



