100 ANIMALS OF THE PAST 



comes into play to treat the fossil as a surgeon treats a 

 fractured limb, to cover it with plaster bandages, and 

 brace it with splints of wood or iron so that the speci- 

 men may not only be taken from the ground but endure 

 in safety the coming journey of a thousand or more 

 miles. For simpler cases or lighter objects strips of 

 sacking, or even paper, applied with flour and water, 

 suffice, or pieces of sacking soaked in thin plaster may be 

 laid over the bone, first covering it with thin paper 

 in order that the plaster jacket may simply stiffen and 

 not adhere to it. Collecting has not always been carried 

 on in this systematic manner, for the development of the 

 present methods has been the result of years of ex- 

 perience ; formerly there was a mere skimming-over of 

 the surface in what Professor Marsh used to term the 

 potato-gathering style, but now the effort is made to 

 remove specimens intact, often imbedded in large 

 masses of rock, in order that all parts may be preserved. 

 We will take it for granted that our specimens have 

 safely passed through all perils by land and water, 

 road and rail; that they have been quarried, boxed, 

 carted over a roadless country to the nearest railway, 

 and have withstood 2,000 miles of jolting in a freight- 

 car. The first step in reconstruction has been taken; 

 the problem, now that the boxes are reposing on the 

 work-room floor, is to make the blocks of stone give ud 

 the secrets they have guarded for ages, to free the bones 

 from their enveloping matrix in order that they may 

 tell us something of the life of the past. The method 

 of doing this varies with the conditions under which the 

 material has been gathered, and if from hard clay, chalk, 

 or shale, the process, though tedious enough at best, 

 is by no means so difficult as if the specimens are im- 

 bedded in solid rock. In this case the fragments from a 

 given section of quarry must be assembled according to 



