112 MY LIFE 



and a manufacturer of plated goods, who bad been thirty years 

 in America. Much of the country I passed through, as well 

 as that around Meriden itself, was picturesque with rock and 

 mountain and rapid streams, vet the whole i ffect was, as I 

 noted it in my journal, " scraggy as usual," while an American 

 writer declares that the whole country " has been reduced to a 

 state of unkempt and sordid ugliness." But I am pretty sure 

 that the more naturally picturesque parts of this New England 

 country must be very beautiful in spring- and early summer, 

 when the abundant vegetation would conceal and beautify 

 that which is bare and ugly in winter. The climate, too, is 

 unfavourable to that amount of verdure which we can show 

 throughout the year; while the universality of old irregular 

 hedgerows in our lowland districts gives a finish and a charm 

 to our scenery which is wholly wanting where straight lines 

 of split-wood fences are almost equally universal. 



My next lecture was at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, on 

 the way to which I had agreed to pay a visit to Professor 

 Marsh, at New Haven, where I arrived on the evening of 

 November 26. My host, who was a bachelor and very 

 wealthy, had built himself an eccentric kind of house, the 

 main feature of which was a large octagonal hall, full of 

 trophies collected during his numerous explorations in the 

 far West, and used as a reception and dining-room, with 

 pretty suites of visitors' rooms opening out of it — a roomy 

 kind of solidly built bungalow. It is situated near the Pea- 

 body Museum of Yale College, where there was at that time 

 the largest collection of fossil skeletons, chiefly of mammals 

 and reptiles of America, to be seen anywhere. The next 

 morning was devoted to seeing these wonderful remains of an 

 extinct world, among which were the huge bones of the 

 atlantosaurus, a reptile near a hundred feet long and thirty 

 feet high, supposed to be the largest land animal that has 

 ever existed. The remarkable horned dinosauria, the flying 

 pterodactyles of strange forms, as well as the almost complete 

 series of links connecting the modern horse with the very 

 ancient eohippus and hyracotherium, were very interesting. 

 These latter were very small animals with four toes, which 



