October 31, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



(01 



sumption that large expenditures for ad- 

 ministration must follow from their man- 

 agement appears gratuitous, and the charge 

 that they may crush out the public spirit 

 of the Laboratory is not warranted by any 

 facts made public. 



A geophysical laboratory, as an object 

 of investment on the part of the Carnegie 

 Institution, does not commend itself to the 

 judgment of the editor, but a laboratory for 

 psychology does. Will I be understood if 

 I plead inability to render an unbiased 

 opinion in a case where my interests as a 

 geologist are so nearly concerned ? 



The establishment of a board of man- 

 agers consisting of twenty eminent scien- 

 tists, as suggested by the Editor of Science, 

 is a feature of a plan which perhaps should 

 be discussed as a whole if at all ; but with 

 regard to such a board it may be suggested 

 that it will in time develop, if it is needed, 

 from the cooperative relations of the special 

 scientific committees. And until the ob- 

 vious need leads to evolution of additional 

 organs, those which the Carnegie Institu- 

 tion now has may well be allowed to dem- 

 onstrate their fitness to accomplish the ends 

 of its generous founder. 



Bailey Willis. 



Lampasas, Texas, 

 September 23, 1902. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 Bibliography and Catalogue of the Fossil 



Vertehrata of North America. (To the end 



of the year 1900.) By Oliver Peery Hay. 



Bull. U. S. Geol. Surv., No. 179, pp. 868, 



1902. 



The present volume represents several years' 

 diligent work on the part of a writer who has 

 faced the hapless task of unraveling the 

 literature of American fossil vertebrates. Of 

 course such a task is by no means that of such 

 a Hercules as C. Davies Sherborn, who is 

 indexing no less than all species of animals; 

 but I fancy it has been found tedious enough. 

 It is missionary work certainly, and its author 



deserves the gratitude of paleontologists, who 

 would otherwise have had to have searched 

 through 667 references for a species of Cope's, 

 225 for one of Marsh's, 221 for one of Leidy's. 

 And the reviewer speaks feelingly, for he has 

 occupied himself en amateur in a far smaller 

 bibliographical study during the past half- 

 dozen years, and can picture better than a lay- 

 man the roomful of closely written cards 

 which the author must have accumulated, and 

 the mere physical labor of hunting up, hand- 

 ling and thumbing a mass of books which if 

 put on a single shelf would extend over a mile. 

 Dr. Hay has not merely ransacked libraries to 

 complete the bibliographical writings of all 

 authors who have meddled with American fos- 

 sil vertebrates, but he has aimed to introduce 

 a complete list of the anatomical and embryo- 

 logical references which bore upon the theme 

 in hand. Then he has picked out the species 

 and fitted them together in systematic arrange- 

 ment, and finally made the names accessible 

 by means of an elaborate index. 



Before criticizing such a work as this, one 

 must evidently bear in mind that absolute ac- 

 curacy or completeness cannot be hoped for. 

 Oversights, omissions and even proof errors 

 are inevitable, and a fair critic, appreciating 

 the volume's general tone of painstaking accu- 

 racy, cannot but feel that it deserves good wish- 

 es and scant blame. Its bad mistakes are rare, 

 but minor omissions, points of disagreement 

 and small errors are not uncommon. Its 

 greatest defect is in the matter of cross-refer- 

 ences to paleontology which occur in embryo- 

 logical and anatomical papers, — a defect 

 which, however, would be naturally expected 

 in a work of this kind. Its bibliographical 

 lists, on the other hand, are generally accurate 

 and well chosen, and are so complete indeed 

 that one regrets that they are not perfect. 

 Running over the names with which I am 

 most familiar I find, for example, such omis- 

 sions as these: A. A. Wright, a '97 Dinich- 

 thys paper; Keyes, Geology of Polk County 

 ('97 Report of Iowa Geol. Survey) ; Emerson, 

 Geology of Old Homestead County, Mass. ; 

 Vaughan, Geology of N. W. Loiiisiana; Red- 

 lich, on Ptychodus; Seely, on Ceratodus; Bol- 

 lo, on Lepidosteus; Ley dig, on Koprolithen u. 



