April 30, 1897.] 



SCIENCE. 



695 



•other than retard science ? Would it not be 

 better for all parties, including the museum 

 and people of Thurso, if this priceless speci- 

 men were sent to Mexico, or to Washington, or 

 to the Godman-Salvin collection in London, or 

 even to Berlin, in exchange for a good teaching 

 set of zoological specimens intelligible to the 

 Thurso fisher-people ? 



This is a strong, though by no means an im- 

 possible case. Every specialist knows similar 

 instances. Of what advantage was it to science 

 that, when Dr. Otto Jaekel was writing his 

 admirable memoir on the Devonian crinoids of 

 Germany, all the type-specimens described by 

 Schultze in his ' Echinodermen des Eifler 

 Kalkes ' were locked up in dusty boxes in a 

 store room at Harvard? As things are, the 

 type-specimens of any group of animals or plants, 

 whether a zoological group, a geographical 

 group, or a stratigraphical group, will be found 

 by the specialist scattered all over the world 

 without reference to country or to facilities for 

 study. And we museum curators go on adding 

 to this confusion as hard as ever we can, with 

 the aid of preliminary notices, and stretch 

 miserly hands over specimens that are wanted 

 most in some center of research 8,000 miles 

 away. We advance our museums, but we retard 

 science. 



And yet there are some of us who are also 

 students and lovers of science. We wish to 

 use our powers for her advancement. This 

 we think might be done partly by the collection 

 of the type-specimens of a single group in a 

 single museum, partly by the restoration of 

 type-specimens to the country of their origin, 

 provided that it possessed a museum capable of 

 preserving them unharmed, partly by the with- 

 drawal of type-specimens from small local 

 museums where they ' waste their sweetness, 

 €tc.,' and are far from safe, to the larger 

 museums with permanent endowment. We do 

 not wish any museum to suffer ; exchange is 

 no robbery, and in this case might be as much 

 gain to each contracting party as it would be to 

 scientific investigators. 



Another small point in Mr. Lucas' notice 

 provokes an explanation. "On the question 

 of loaning specimens," says he, "Mr. Bather 

 dwells lightly, owing to his connection with the 



British Museum, whose policy in this respect is 

 well known." This is Mr. Lucas' reason, not 

 mine. My view is that type-specimens should 

 not be lent (they should, if necessary, be ex- 

 changed) ; but other material should be lent 

 freely to responsible workers. There is always 

 a danger of loss ; but, while the lost type-speci- 

 men can never be replaced, the gain to the 

 museum and to science through the study and 

 description of ordinary specimens more than 

 counterbalance the occasional loss of one. This 

 is not the policy of the British Museum, and no 

 remarks of mine are likely to make it so. 

 Similarly my opinions will not prevent me from 

 borrowing type-specimens of crinoids from any 

 museum rash enough to lend them to me. 



F. A. Bathee. 

 British Museum (Nat. Hist.), April 15, 1897. 



THE QUATEENABY OF MISSOURI. 



To THE Editoe of SCIENCE: After reading 

 the quite satisfactory review of my report on 

 the Quaternary of Missouri, in your issue of 

 April 9th, some unanswered questions were left 

 in my mind. As the answers may be of in- 

 terest to others I venture to offer them through 

 your columns. Mr. Hershey suggests that the 

 idea that the loess ' area deposited by broad 

 semilacustrine stream floods,' 'would not have 

 originated upon certain other areas, for in- 

 stance, the upper Mississippi region.' Is not 

 this virtually the origin conceived the most 

 probable for the loess of the ' Driftless Area ' 

 by Chamberlin and Salisbury in the 6th Annual 

 Report, U. S. Geol. Survey? 



Mr. Hershey, if I understood rightly, sug- 

 gests that the loess deposits of Missouri and of 

 southern Illinois as well as of the upper Mis- 

 sissippi were formed in a vast lake or arm of the 

 sea. If that be the case I would ask (1) why 

 no traces of beach ridges have been preserved 

 anywhere, and (2) how he would account for 

 the absence of loess from surfaces along the 

 Mississippi below the supposed ' barrier ' much 

 lower than the general level of the loess north- 

 west of that ' barrier,' viz., the Osage Gasconade 

 divide ? 



If I had been able to find beach ridges and 

 been able to make the margin of the loess south 

 of the Missouri river pass easily into that west 



