HERLUP WINGE MORTENSEN 519 



how the various cusps in different mammals correspond to one 

 another, and how the various tooth forms have developed from 

 one another. In the diagram introduced by Winge we have an 

 exceedingly simple, but absolutely clear method of indicating the 

 morphological value of every tooth form. 



It may perhaps appear somewhat exaggerated to attach such great 

 importance to this unraveling of tooth relationship. It is, however, 

 by no means so. The teeth in mammals reflect in such high degree 

 the habits and organization of the entire creature that one may, as 

 it were, from a molar alone draw conclusions as to the whole animal. 

 The teeth [within certain limits] ^ form the main foundation for 

 recognizing generic interrelations. Moreover, teeth are particularly 

 fit for being preserved in a fossil condition; of the oldest forms of 

 mammals, we know scarcely more than the teeth, at most now and 

 then a fragment of a lower jaw. To have given the correct de- 

 ciphering of the tooth structure of mammals, is, therefore, a scien- 

 tific achievement that is in itself sufficient for securing its author 

 imperishable honor. But this is not Winge's only achievement. 



In 1888 appeared the first volume of " E. Museo Lundii," the large 

 work on Dr. P. V. Lund's collections of fossil bones from the lime- 

 stone caves of Brazil, published at the expense of the Carlsberg 

 Foundation. To this volume Winge contributed a large memoir 

 " Jordfundne og nulevende Gnavere " (Rodents, fossil and recent) . 

 This is the first of a long series of memoirs in which are successively 

 worked out: bats, marsupials, monkeys, carnivores, ungulates and 

 edentates; the last of them appeared in 1915. While Volume I 

 contains contributions by Reinhardt, Liitken, piuf Winge, and 

 S0ren Hansen, the whole of the rest of the work is exclusively 

 Herluf Winge's — truly a monumental accomplishment that will 

 secure to Winge a place of honor among paleontologists and mam- 

 malogists, carried out, as it is, with the greatest care and exactness, 

 and with an immense learning. While the first five of these memoirs 

 are accompanied by a French resume, the two last, and largest, are 

 exclusively in Danish. 



This work alone would be designated as a great life work. But 

 Winge has yielded much more. Let me first mention that from 

 1891-1910 2 he took charge of the annual report on the birds at the 

 Danish lighthouses. Originating in England in 1879, an arrange- 

 ment was introduced in Denmark in the middle of the eighties, 

 mainly on the initiative of Oluf Winge and by means of a small 

 annual grant from the Government, by which all the birds that fall 

 at the Danish lights are to be forwarded to the Zoological Museum for 



iThe vrorda within the brackets were added by Mr. Gerrit S. Miller, Jr. 

 » In the Danish text erroneously 1906. 



