APPENDIX A 351 



periods the United States and almost every other portion of the earth 

 were connected by land and severed from all other regions by water — 

 and, from the study of certain other groups of animals, arrive at 

 directly opposite and incompatible conclusions. 



The most brilliant and unsafe exponent of this school was Ame- 

 ghino, who possessed and abused two gifts, both essential to the high- 

 est type of scientist, and both mischievous unless this scientist possess 

 a rare and accurate habit of thought joined to industry and mastery 

 of detail: — namely, the gift of clear and interesting writing, and the gift 

 of generalization. Ameghino rendered marked services to paleontology. 

 But he generalized with complete recklessness from the slenderest data; 

 and even these data he often completely misunderstood or misinterpreted. 

 His favorite thesis included the origin of mammalian life and of man 

 himself in southernmost South America, with, as incidents, the belief 

 that the mammalian-bearing strata of South America were of much 

 greater age than the strata with corresponding remains elsewhere; that 

 in South America various species and genera of men existed in tertiary 

 times, some of them at least as advanced as fairly well advanced mod- 

 ern savages; that there existed various land bridges between South 

 America and other southern continents, including Africa; and that the 

 ancestral types of modern mammals and of man himself wandered 

 across one of these bridges to the old world, and that thence their re- 

 mote descendants, after ages of time, returned to the new. In addition 

 to valuable investigations of fossil-bearing beds in the Argentine, he 

 made some excellent general suggestions, such as that the pithecoid 

 apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of man's ancestral stem 

 but represent a divergence from it away from humanity and toward 

 a retrogressive bestialization. But of his main theses he proves none, 

 and what evidence we have tells against them. At the Museum of 

 La Plata I found that the authorities were practically a unit in regard- 

 ing his remains of tertiary men and proto-men as being either the 

 remains of tertiary American monkeys or of American Indians from 

 strata that were long post-tertiary. The extraordinary discovery, due 

 to that eminent scientist and public servant Doctor Moreno, of the 

 remains of man associated with the remains of the great extinct South 

 American fauna, of the mylodon, of a giant ungulate, of a huge cat 

 like the lion, and of an extraordinary aberrant horse (of a wholly differ- 

 ent genus from the modern horse) conclusively shows that in its later 



