THE MIOCENE BEDS OF THE JOHN DAY RIVER, OREGON. 541 
‘vertical seams of carbonate of lime. The beds are hard to explore, as they are 
almost perpendicular, with here and there a narrow projecting shelf that gives a 
precarious foothold. Only persons who have had long experience in collecting, 
and who have enthusiasm enough to risk their lives for science, can hope,to meet 
with success; otherwise they will go away with no specimens, or only fragments 
some friendly wash has carried to a level place. The beds differ from any that 
I have ever explored, and a day’s climbing among them would convince any 
but an experienced collector that they were destitute of fossils. The amount of 
labor required to wrest from Dame Nature her hidden treasures is great, but she 
always rewards persistent effort. I have more than once explored a locality for 
two weeks without success, and then found a splendid specimen in the very 
ground I had gone over again and again. 
For nine or ten years these beds have been explored, and each year an 
equally rich harvest has been gathered. The fossil remains are often in concre- 
tions with eye rim, or the point of a tooth, or small portion of some other bone 
exposed, and you can easily see how carefully one must look, when hardly one 
concretion in a thousand contains anything of value. Of course, the smaller the 
amount of the skull that is exposed, the more perfect will be the specimens 
imprisoned in the friendly concretion. In the two years I worked in these beds 
I found great numbers of perfect skulls and many more or less perfect skeletons 
of various mammals, and in all my explorations in the fossil beds of the North- 
west I never found such perfect specimens. At one time I got a nearly perfect 
skeleton of a large mammal unfortunately the skull was missing. It proved to 
be a new species belonging to a new genus: Cope called it boocherus humerosus, 
on account of a huge projection on the humerus. It was as large as a rhinoceros, 
with great pillar like limbs. 
One great trouble we found in collecting was the dazzling surface of the 
beds we had to examine, the eyes soon becoming tired. We often had the 
sensation of snow blindness: five hours constant looking was a good day’s work. 
The most abundant fossil found was the oveoclon, or the extinct hog, as they 
closely resembled that family. Three or four species were discovered, some 
‘about the size of the Texas peccary, others as large as the wild boar of Europe. 
I have been enabled to furnish Professor Cope a number of perfect skeletons of 
this genus, as their anatomy is well made out. The animals found belong to 
tropical countries. The rhinocerous is quite common, three or more species, one 
has a horn on each side of the end of the nose. The /zpparion and other ances- 
tors of the horse are found. One peculiar new genus I discovered was an an- 
cestor of the South American Llama; Cope calls it Probotherium sternbergit. Instead 
of there being but one metacarpal as on the Llama, there are two pressed closely 
together, and, reasoning from the evolution theory, we would expect this to be 
the case in the ancestor of the Llama, because, in the metacarpal of the Llama, 
there are two projecting articulations for the attachment of two toes, and from 
each articulation a medullary canal extends back the whole length of the bone. 
