A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



assert that the results of recent researches seem "to 

 leave a clear balance in favor of the doctrine of the 

 evolution of living forms one from another." Six 

 years later, when reviewing the work of Marsh in 

 America and of Gaudry in Pikermi, he declared that, 

 "on the evidence of paleontology, the evolution of 

 many existing forms of animal life from their pred- 

 ecessors is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical 

 fact." In 1 88 1 he asserted that the evidence gathered 

 in the previous decade had been so unequivocal that, 

 had the transmutation hypothesis not existed, "the 

 paleontologist would have had to invent it." 



Since then the delvers after fossils have piled proof 

 on proof in bewildering profusion. The fossil-beds in 

 the "bad lands" of western America seem inexhaus- 

 tible. And in the Connecticut River Valley near rela- 

 tives of the great reptiles which Professor Marsh and 

 others have found in such profusion in the West left 

 their tracks on the mud-flats since turned to sand- 

 stone ; and a few skeletons also have been found. The 

 bodies of a race of great reptiles that were the lords of 

 creation of their day have been dissipated to their ele- 

 ments, while the chance indentations of their feet as 

 they raced along the shores, mere footprints on the 

 sands, have been preserved among the most imperish- 

 able of the memory-tablets of the world. 



Of the other vertebrate fossils that have been found 

 in the eastern portions of America, among the most 

 abundant and interesting are the skeletons of masto- 

 dons. Of these one of the largest and most complete is 

 that which was unearthed in the bed of a drained lake 

 near Newburg, New York, in 1845. This specimen was 



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