SAMUEL WENDELL WILLISTON 685. 
Permian, where in several groups he marked the beginnings of the 
higher forms which he had previously studied, as well as the adap- 
tive radiation of the lower forms to a great variety of habits and 
habitats. 
Professor E. C. Case, now of the University of Michigan, who 
was one of Williston’s students at the University of Kansas, had 
co-operated with the late Professor Georg Baur at the University 
of Chicago in the study of Dimetrodon and other Permian reptiles 
and had collected for that University a number of important types 
of pelycosaurs and cotylosaurs. After Baur’s untimely death Case 
continued to collect and study the Permian reptiles and amphibians 
of Texas and other states, finally issuing his well-known Carnegie 
Institution monographic revisions of the Pelycosauria and Cotylo- 
sauria, in which he revised and extended Cope’s work on these 
animals and figured the types and other important specimens in 
the American Museum of Natural History, in the University of 
Chicago, and elsewhere. Thus Cope, Baur, Case, and Broili had 
opened and partly explored an important field of work which 
Williston had long desired to enter. 
Accordingly in 1907 and 1908 Williston began to publish on this 
subject which occupied most of the closing decade of his life and 
constituted perhaps his greatest contribution to science. It is 
pleasant to record that Williston and Case at all times fully and 
cordially co-operated with each other in the study of Permian rep- 
tiles and amphibians. In i908 he published an important but 
brief paper on the Cotylosauria, containing a description of the 
skeleton of Labidosaurus incisivus. In the same year Mr. Paul C. 
Miller, of the American Museum of Natural History, a collector 
and preparator of high rank, became Professor Williston’s assistant 
at Chicago, and under his direction began a long series of explora- 
tions in the Texas Permian which have yielded results of the greatest 
importance to vertebrate morphology and paleontology. During 
the next decade these expeditions brought back to the University 
a great number of specimens, some of which will become more 
and more famous as their great importance is gradually realized. 
More or less complete skeletons were discovered, extricated with 
great skill, and admirably described in a long series of publications. 
