104 Sioux City Academy of Science and Letters. 



the fox, in the tertiary beds in Wyoming, and at once 

 proclaimed this extinct animal the progenitor of the 

 horse, notwithstanding that all other vertebrates were 

 preceded by gigantic ancestors. It was left to the 

 author of this brochure to correct this error and place 

 this servant and companion of man in the same rela- 

 tions as other animal organisms as to gigantic ances- 

 tral heritage. 



Some eight years since, while searching in the out- 

 cropping of the tertiary beds that are found along the 

 Big Sioux just south of the Talbot farm, nine teeth of 

 the extinct horse were found in the sand pits which 

 abound in this territor3^ These teeth were about three 

 times the size of those of the horse as he is now known. 

 Specimens of which can be seen in the museum of the 

 Academy of Science and Letters of this city; also in the 

 Smithsonian Institute at Washington, D. C. 



This gigantic ancestral horse we named Hippus 

 Giganticus. Man^'^ other fossilized teeth of the same 

 gigantic animal have been found in Wyoming tertiary 

 beds hj parties sent out by Yale .and Harvard during 

 the last year, and a gigantic parentage of the horse has 

 been fully established. 



It is the law of natural selection to establish a fixed- 

 ness of type, and only environmental influences change 

 this type and cause variation sufficient to produce a type 

 of sub-species. Hence from giantism to dwarfism is the 

 rule when suitable alimentation is scarce. This rule has 

 held good all through the ages, and only Avhen selection 

 has been guided b^^ the human intelligence has there 

 been any tendency to return to the original dimensions. 



Believing tlien, that giantism was the primitive 

 phj^sical condition of our race, and that pigmy races are 

 the mere i)hysical degenerates of gigantic parentage, we 

 are prepared to discuss some characteristics of this race 

 of dwarfs. 



While grading a public road near Climbing Hill, in 

 Woodbury county, about two years ago, there were 

 exhumed parts of three skeletons of a race which seems 

 anamolous and out of joint with characteristics of the 

 environary races or the then inhabiting people. We 



