I 



EDITORIAL . 115 



does do for the child? It is to be hoped that we may think to- 

 gether along these lines and develop some satisfactory methods 

 of determining in how far we are accomplishing the things which 

 we hopefully set out to accomplish. Such data, in place of the 

 vague assertions which are alone possible now, will satisfy the 

 advocates of nature-study and effectually quell opposition. 



Book Reviews for March 



A History of the Land Mammals in the Western Hemisphere, by 

 William B.Scott, pp. XII plus 693. TheMacmillanCo., $5.00 



This book is dedicated to "my classmates, Henry Fairfield 

 Osborne and Francis Spear, in token of forty years' unclouded 

 friendship." In the preface is related how, one afternoon in June 

 1876, three Princeton undergraduates, lying under the trees on 

 the canal bank, discussed a fossil-collecting expedition to the West 

 and that then and there they determined to go and see these 

 wonderful fossil remains for themselves. For Scott, the author 

 of this book, and Osborne, the decision was momentous, for it 

 determined their life work. It is interesting that simultaneously 

 with the appearance of this book of Scott's, Osborne's book on 

 The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia and North America, is also 

 appearing from the press of the same company. 



The numerous expeditions for collecting fossils from our own 

 western country have been so frequent and the material discovered 

 so abundant, that many interesting histories of various great 

 groups of animals in the comparatively recent rocks of our Bad 

 Lands can be written with a fair degree of completeness. This book 

 includes a great deal of this material, all that is really important 

 and decisive. Here are reconstructed the ancestral lines of descent 

 and here are figured the various animals that represent the more 

 generalized precursors of the modern mammal inhabitants of 

 our earth. It is impossible to write a book of this sort without 

 including a good many technical terms and scientific names, in 

 fact all of these old animals have no other names than scientific 

 ones. It is not an easy book, therefore, for the uninitiated to read 

 but if one has any interest whatever in matters of this sort, he 

 will likely wade through the necessary scientific terminology in 



