August 7, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



209 



Thought," by George Idle, Esq., M.I.N.A., de- 

 livered at the Eoyal College of Science, Dub- 

 lin, on January 27, which suggests at least the 

 position which scientific work should hold in 

 a modern state. Moreover, the lay press is be- 

 ginning to consider the subject, entirely with 

 sympathy for the scientific worker; and we 

 ■should like to give special commendation to 

 the efforts being made by the Morning Post 

 in its series of articles and letters published 

 during May and June. 



The question now arises as to what had best 

 be done under the circumstances; and it has 

 been suggested that those who wish to do so 

 would be wise to form a union of some kind 

 with a program specifically aimed at improv- 

 ing the position of the workers themselves. 

 At present there are numerous societies which 

 are supposed, more or less indirectly, to at- 

 tend to this very necessary work, but which 

 certainly have not achieved much success in 

 it. We should therefore like to receive any 

 suggestions upon the subject, together with 

 the names of those who may feel inclined to 

 join such a movement if the program ulti- 

 mately decided upon meets with their ap- 

 proval. — Science Progress. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 The Osteology of the Chalicotheroidea, with 

 special reference to a mounted sheleton of 

 Moropus elatus Marsh, now installed in the 

 Carnegie Museum. By W. J. Holland and 

 O. A. Peterson. Memoirs of the Carnegie 

 Museum, Vol. III., No. 2. Pittsburgh, De- 

 cember, 1913, pp. i-xvi, 189^11, with 115 

 text figures, and plates XLVHI.-LXXVII. 

 The Chalicotheroidea, a curious aberrant 

 ■group of Perissodactyl ungulates wherein the 

 hoof bones have departed widely from the 

 normal type, becoming laterally compressed, 

 deeply fissured and claw-like, form the sub- 

 ject of this volume. The Carnegie Museum 

 was fortunate in securing through the efforts 

 of Messrs. 0. A. Peterson and W. H. Utter- 

 bach an almost complete skeleton of the re- 

 markable Moropus elatus Marsh, by means of 

 which the entire osteology of a typical mem- 

 ber of the group has been worked out. 



The locality of this specimen lay not far 

 from that whence one of Professor Marsh's 

 collectors, H. C. Clifford, secured the some- 

 what fragmental material which constitutes 

 the type of the species elatus. Clifford's dis- 

 covery in the spring of 18Y5 was destined to 

 be followed years later, in 1904, by the finding 

 on the upper Niobrara River in western Ne- 

 braska of one of the most remarkable bone 

 deposits in the world, the Agate Spring 

 quarry of Lower Miocene age; and it is this 

 locality, which has been worked successively 

 by the representatives of several institutions, 

 Carnegie Museum, American Museum, Uni- 

 versity of Nebraska, Amherst and Tale, which 

 has produced a number of skulls and skele- 

 tons of this type, among them the one form- 

 ing the basis of this memoir. While Dr. Hol- 

 land is the senior author of the memoir, Mr. 

 Peterson is credited with the recovery of much 

 of the material, its preparation for study and 

 description and the partial preparation of 

 those sections of the paper which relate to the 

 appendicular skeleton, and to the skull and 

 dentition. 



The introductory chapter gives a history of 

 the excavations at the Agate Spring quarries 

 and tells of the conditions of deposition as fol- 

 lows (pp. 194-95) : 



" The ' Agate Spring quarries ' . . . are sit- 

 uated in the Lower Harrison Beds (Miocene) 

 and contain a vast quantity of the remains of 

 extinct mammalia many of which, before the 

 specimens were firmly embedded in the ma- 

 trix, had suffered more or less displacement. 

 It is rarely that the bones are found collo- 

 cated in their true order, though in some in- 

 stances a dozen or more vertebrEe may occur 

 in regular series, -with the corresponding ribs 

 attached to them, or the bones of an entire 

 limb may be found in place. The region, at 

 the time when the bones were deposited, was 

 probably a great plain, traversed by a broad 

 and shallow river, like the Platte, or the Mis- 

 souri, subject at times to overflows. It was a 

 region of flat alluvial lands, which may in the 

 suromers have been in part dried, leaving here 

 and there pools of water to which the animals 



