422 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY AND PALEONTOLOGY. 



Leith Adams have been engaged in the palseontological 

 research of fossil Mammalia. 



The broad plains of Russia have afforded numerous speci- 

 mens of Diluvial fossil Mammals, the Tertiary formations in 

 the vicinity of Odessa and Bessarabia have yielded remains 

 of the oldest fossil Mammals, more especially of Cetacea 

 and Pinnipedia. The leading investigators of these remains 

 have been J. F. Brandt, A. von Nordmann, and M. Pavlow. 

 A rich fossil Mammalian fauna was discovered by Forsyth 

 Major (1887) on the island of Samos, in formations con- 

 temporaneous with those of Pikermi. 



Many Mammalian remains in the Diluvial deposits of North 

 America were known as early as the eighteenth century. In 

 the year 1857 Emmons discovered the famous Dinotherium 

 jaw from the Triassic rocks of Virginia. A strict scientific 

 investigation of fossil Mammalia was first inaugurated in 

 North America by Joseph Leidy, the late Professor of 

 Anatomy at the University of Philadelphia. In the year 

 1853, Leidy's Monograph on the Mammalian Remains of 

 Nebraska revealed a fauna quite different from all European 

 faunas then known. Two later works (1869 and 1873) showed 

 that Mammalian faunas, of which no one had previously any 

 conception, were interred in the successive Tertiary deposits 

 in the Far West of North America. 



The excellent publications of Leidy inspired O C. Marsh 

 and E. D. Cope to begin in the early seventies their pro- 

 longed series of valuable researches on the fossil Mam- 

 malian faunas in the Far West. Immense sums of money were 

 required, and were readily procured, for the disinterment of 

 the fossil remains. To the penetration of Marsh 1 and his 

 well-trained collectors, palaeontology owed the discovery of 



1 Othniel Charles Marsh, nephew of the rich philanthropist Peabody, 

 was born on the 2Qth October 1831, at Lockport, in New York State; 

 studied in Yale College at New Haven, in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Breslau, 

 and travelled in Germany, the Alps, and other parts of Europe during 

 his student days. After his return to America, he was in 1866 appointed 

 Professor of Palaeontology at Yale University, and Director of the 

 Geological and Palseontological Department of the Museum founded 

 by Peabody, a post which he occupied for thirty years. He organised 

 numerous expeditions to the Far West, which was then a most inhospitable 

 region, and secured over a thousand new species of fossil Mammalia. He 

 bequeathed his private collection, formed at his own expense, to the 

 Peabody Museum. The specimens collected at the expense of the State 

 are now in Washington. He died at New Haven, in March 1899. 



