2 P>'of. 0. C. Marsh — European Dinosaurs. 



to have suffered much from hoth their enemies and their friends. 

 Man}' of them were destroyed and dismembered long ago by their 

 natural enemies, but, more recently, their friends have done them 

 further injustice in putting together their scattered remains, and 

 restoring them to supposed lifelike forms. 



You are all doubtless familiar with the story told by your witty 

 countryman, George Lewis, in his life of Goethe, of an international 

 attempt to reconstruct the camel. To complete this task, the English- 

 man, it is said, travelled to distant lands, studied the animal in its 

 native wilds, and then prepai'ed his report; the Frenchman went to 

 the museum in Paris, examined stuffed specimens and skeletons, 

 and wrote his account; while the German remained in his study at 

 home, meditated on the subject, and finally evolved his idea of the 

 camel from his inner consciousness. Similar methods, but not on 

 the same international lines, have been followed in the case of the 

 Dinosaurs, and if some of those that have been restored could 

 speak, whatever they might say about the pi'ehistoric enemies that 

 destroyed them, they would surely ask to be saved from their 

 latter-day friends. 



Seriously, I think justice has not been done to this remarkable 

 group of reptiles in rehabilitating them for the benefit of the rising 

 generation in science, and some of the attempts, I fear, have been 

 so firmly implanted in text-book literature, that, like the oft-repeated 

 myth of the "coral insect," the errors will pass down to the next 

 century before being eradicated. The German method has some- 

 times been used by Anglo-Saxons, and with a success quite equal 

 to that in the case of the camel. To take one instance familiar to 

 you all, let me mention Megalosaurus, the first Dinosaur described, 

 and also Iguanodon, an herbivorous colleague, on which it doubtless 

 preyed. The first restoration of these two reptiles made them, as 

 they were supposed to be in life, quadrupedal, or four-footed animals, 

 of forbidding aspect, and as such they have since haunted the visions 

 of several genei'ations, young and old, by night and by day. I have 

 just made a pilgrimage to Sydenham to see with my own eyes these 

 famous restorations, and, so far as I can judge, there is nothing like 

 unto them in the heavens, or on the earth, or in the waters under 

 the earth. We now know from good evidence that both Megalo- 

 saurus and Iguanodon were bipedal, and to represent them as creeping, 

 except in their extreme youth, would be almost as incongruous as to 

 do this by the genus Homo. 



Lest it be supposed that I consider the Dinosaurs alone to have 

 suffered from the attempts of their friends to restore them to life, 

 I might recall to your remembrance the well-known figure in the 

 text-books of Dinotherium, reclining peacefully, with its feet and 

 limbs concealed, for the simple reason that no one knew anything 

 about them ; or that other picture of the Labyrinthodon without 

 a tail, deliberately making footprints upon the sands of time, 

 while no such form has yet been discovered. I might refer to 

 still more frightful examples of the dangers encountered by over- 

 zealous historians of ancient life, but those given will suffice. 



