680 HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN 
promptly accepted his invitation and sold my watch and borrowed enough to 
take me there in March..... It was thus with feelings almost of awe that 
I met Professor Marsh for the first time at New Haven, Connecticut, on 
March 19 or 20, 1876. My heart was in my mouth when I knocked at the 
basement door of the old Treasury Building and heard the not very pleasant 
invitation to ‘come in.” There was a frown on Marsh’s face, accentuated by 
his nearsightedness, as he waited for me to state my business. No doubt he 
thought me a wild and woolly westerner in my military cloak, slouch hat, and 
cowboy boots, as I stammered my name. But he quickly made me feel more 
at ease. He found me quarters in a little building in the rear of Peabody 
Museum then approaching completion. The next day he set me at work 
studying bird skeletons with Owen’s Comparative Anatomy as a guide. He was 
then deeply interested in his Odontornithes, and wanted newer specimens, 
especially of the smaller forms, which were very difficult to find in the Kansas 
chalk. For recreation I helped a few hours every day to carry trays of fossils 
to the museum. 
Williston was now twenty-four years of age Vertebrate pale- 
ontology had become his first love, but he had leanings toward 
human anatomy and medicine and entomology, ‘first as an avoca- 
tion and then as a vocation. He was afforded no independent 
opportunities for paleontological research and publication by Pro- 
fessor Marsh. In the summer seasons of 1876 and 1877 he collected 
with Professor Mudge in the Cretaceous chalk of Kansas. In 1877 
he was sent by Professor Marsh to the Morrison, Canyon City, 
and Como quarries to co-operate with Professors Lakes and Mudge 
and Mr. Reed in taking out the types of AWantosaurus, Diplodocus, 
and other sauropods. In Professor Marsh’s laboratory Williston 
worked on the dinosaurs. In the field in 1878 he helped to collect 
the “Jurassic Mammals” and some of the smaller dinosaurs. For 
nine years (1876-85) he worked in Professor Marsh’s laboratory, 
where he became closely associated with Marsh’s other assistants, 
especially Harger and Baur, who influenced him greatly and for 
whom he had great admiration. He wrote a biographic note on 
Harger in 1887, which gives some interesting side lights on the 
relations of Professor Marsh to his assistants. In 1878 he pub- 
lished a brief communication on American Jurassic dinosaurs in 
the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Sciences; but he had 
very little opportunity for further publication in vertebrate paleon- 
Dal cis 
