August 25, 1898] 



NATURE 



395 



The second restoration is that of the little four-toed 

 Lower Eocene horse {Protorohippus vcnticolus). This 

 animal in life was about four hands or sixteen inches in 

 height at the withers. The mane is left upright ; the 

 forequarters and neck are striped. The body is, perhaps, 

 too large for such very slender and graceful legs. 



The third restoration is based on a study of the 

 mounted skeleton of the Accrat/icni/iii, a hornless form 

 of rhinoceros from the Upper Oligocene formation. 



The next picture represents the six-horned Profoccras, 

 a Tertiary ruminant from South Dakota, not unlike the 

 North American prong-horn antelope, with soft snout 

 and fleshy upper lip as in the modern saiga. 



Mefamyfwiion, an aquatic hornless rhinoceros from 

 the same deposits, affords the subject for a fifth cartoon. 

 The giant pig {FJothcriiim), from South Dakota lake 

 deposits, forms a sixth illustration. The head in the 

 male is of enormous size, but the chest is small and the 

 limbs are extremely tall and stilted. The great project- 

 ing flanges below the cheeks, 

 for the attachment of the 

 masseter muscles, presented 

 peculiar difficulties to the artist 

 to represent correctly. 



Another striking group is 

 thatof theTitanothere, a huge 

 horned pachyderm, of which 

 the male, female and young 

 are depicted. There is no 

 doubt that the females were 

 smaller, and possessed imper- 

 fectly-developed horns and 

 narrow zygomatic arches ; the 

 males had a pair of extremely 

 long recurved horns, placed 

 transversely on the nasals. 

 In the general structure of the 

 skull, as well as in its dentition, 

 Titanothcriiim (except in the 

 peculiar position of the horns) 

 suggests the modern rhino- 

 ceros. 



The most striking of these 

 large early Tertiary mammals 

 is undoubtedly the Uinta- 

 t/terium, of which Mr. Knight 

 has made an excellent picture. 

 There are quite a number of 

 species of this huge many- 

 horned ungulate, lor which 

 the sub-order Dinocerata was 

 proposed by Prof. O. C. 

 Marsh, and on which that 

 author founded an admirable 

 quarto monograph in 1884. Like many American forms 

 it enjoys several generic names, as Dinoceras^ Tifioccras^ 

 and Uiiitatherium ; the last, being that proposed by 

 Prof Leidy in 1872, has no doubt the strongest claim to 

 priority. 



Three pairs of bony, rounded horn-like protuberances 

 mark the skull ; the tusks, which are large, are thought 

 to have been used to draw the branches and leaves of 

 shrubs into the mouth ; the skeleton at once suggests 

 that of the elephant, and presupposes a similar hide. 

 A papier mache (life-size) restoration of the skeleton of 

 Uintathetiuin {Tinoceras) inj^ctis, presented by Prof. O. 

 C. Marsh, in addition to Mr. Knight's restoration of U. 

 >mutum, grace the Natural History Museum in Crom- 

 ell Road. 



To these we may add the restoration of Hyracodon, a 

 small running form of rhinoceros of as light a build as 

 a modern zebra, but lacking its grace of head. 



The tenth restoration is that of a large carnivore 

 Mesonyx, which, from the blunted condition of its teeth, 



NO, 1504, VOL. 58] 



;. 5. — Anterior view of a 

 single dorsal vertebra of 

 Nanosaufus claviger (nat. 

 size),Cope. Permian, Texas 

 (Ce, centrum). 



suggests that the animal was omnivorous in diet, and 

 that it might have lived partly upon turtles or decaying 

 animal food. The body is represented as large and the 

 legs very short, and therefore not well adapted for the 

 pursuit of living prey. 



Palaosyops, a Middle Eocene Titanothere resembling 

 the tapir in habits, with an elongated prehensile upper 

 lip and slender fore-feet, is believed to have inhabited 

 the low marshy lands, feeding entirely upon the softer 

 kinds of leaves and grasses, since its teeth are unadapted 

 to hard vegetable food. 



The last restoration is that of the Mastodon, which,, 

 being so much akin to the elephants of to-day, affords 

 little scope for the imagination in depicting him as a 

 living animal. 



The feet are larger and more projecting than in the 

 existing species of elephants, the limbs are relatively 

 shorter, and the head has the low flat skull of the 

 African rather than the high prominent forehead of the 

 Indian elephant. 



We cannot fail to congratulate Prof. Osborn on the 

 work upon which he is engaged, and to express the hope 

 that many more of these restorations may be evolved 

 from the fertile invention of the artist, tempered by the 

 careful and chastening influence of the comparative 

 anatomists of the American Museum of Natural History, 

 New York. 



JOHN A. R. NEWLANDS. 

 \ VTE regret to have to record the death of .Mr. John 

 ♦ ♦ " Newlands, as a consequence of an attack of 

 influenza, at the comparatively early age of sixty-one. 

 While probably no subject in the whole range of theoretical 

 chemistry has received a greater amount of attention than 

 the numerical relations among the atomic weights of the 

 elements, few among the younger generations of chemists 

 are acquainted with the circumstances attending the 

 establishment of the remarkable generalisation usually 

 known as the " Periodic Law." The contemporaries of 

 Newlands, however, and all who have taken the trouble 

 to look into the literature of the subject, know that it was 

 he who discovered the fundamental relation emi)odied in 

 this so-called law, and that he clearly expressed the con- 

 nection between atomic weight and properties about five 

 years before any publication of their views either by 

 Mendeleef or Lothar Meyer. Fortunately the facts stand 

 out from the records clearly enough, but it is difficult 

 now, after a lapse of more than thirty years, to explain 

 the indifference of the chemical world to an observation 

 so remarkable as that to which Newlands drew attentiorv 

 first in the Chemical News, August 1864, again more 

 fully in the same journal, August 1865, and a third time 

 more emphatically in a communication to the Chemica! 

 Society, March 9, 1866. For many years previously 

 the subject had been, so to speak, in the air. Numerous 

 papers by Dumas, Gladstone, and latterly by Odling,^ 

 had appeared in which various arrangements of the 

 atomic weights had been adopted, but none of a compre- 

 hensive kind ; yet when a scheme which consisted not of 

 a number of isolated groups, but which supplied a system 

 covering the whole of the known elements, was brought 

 forward, all that the Chemical Society could do was to- 

 reject it with ridicule and contempt, and to decline to 

 print a word of the new doctrine in the then scanty 

 pages of '\\.s Journal. The unsettled state of opinion in 

 reference to the numerical values of many atomic weights 

 call be the only excuse for what seems like stupidity and 

 prejudice, for Newlands' arrangement required the adop- 

 tion of the atomic weights standardised as recommended 

 by Cannizzaro in 1864-66, and these values were still, 

 unknown to, or ignored by many chemists. Newlands 

 called his scheme the '• Law of Octaves," and he showed 



