haps he fancied himself as a sort of evolu- 

 tionai-y Jove, issuing edicts for the guid- 

 ance of his followers. In his later years, 

 Osbom became remarkably pompous and 

 vain — a result of having occupied high 

 positions in the scientific world, as well as 

 in the social milieu of New York. But as 

 Gregory pointed out, "Osbom himself was 

 under no delusion as to the lack of enthu- 

 siasm with which his writings on the the- 

 ory of evolution were received in many 

 quarters." Osbom had a strong predilec- 

 tion for the concept of orthogenesis — the 

 idea that organisms evolved inexorably in 

 determined directions, like soldiers 

 marching toward a defined objective. Fur- 

 thermore, Osbom became obsessed with 

 the idea of evolutionary parallehsm — for 

 him, animals separated at very early stages 

 in their histories to evolve side by side 

 along discrete, but similar, lines. 



Osborn's view of evolution through 

 time is nicely exemplified in his huge, two- 

 volume monograph on the proboscideans 

 (the mastodonts and elephants) in which 

 the Unes of all families are traced back to 

 presumably ancient, unknown origins, and 

 nothing seems to be ancestral to anything 

 else. This concept of straight-fine evolu- 

 tion prevailed in his earlier works, includ- 

 ing his researches on fossil horses. 



A similar story is seen in Osbom's stud- 

 ies of human evolution — in this case with 

 Gregory doing much of the detailed re- 

 search. In the end, Osbom wished to carry 

 the origins of mankind far back in time, 

 beyond anything justified by geologic evi- 

 dence. Gregory claimed Osbom was "af- 

 flicted with pithecophobia — the dread of 

 apes as relatives or ancestors." Although 

 their views became irreconcilably diver- 

 gent over this issue, they remained friends. 



Despite several of his stubbomly held 

 premises in approaching the material, Os- 

 bom made many outstanding contribu- 

 tions to vertebrate evolution, notably his 

 work on the basic evolutionary relation- 

 ships of reptiles, on the origin of mammals 

 from mammallike reptiles, on the origins 

 of mammalian molar teeth, and on the 

 evolutionary histories of the perisso- 

 dactyls, or odd-toed hoofed mammals — 

 the titanotheres, rhinoceroses, and horses. 

 While writing his massive monograph on 

 the elephants, Osbom liked to revise his 

 drafts after the work was set in type. 



A personality such as Osbom's — over- 

 bearing, pompous, and vain — is apt to col- 

 lide with the real world now and then. 

 Once Osborn, accompanied by Fred 

 Smythe, of the Museum's finance office, 

 went to City Hall in New York, to see 



William Diller Matthew 



AMNH 



Joseph McKee, president of the Borough 

 of Manhattan. Osbom announced to the 

 receptionist that "President Osbom is here 

 to see Mr. McKee." Soon a flunky ap- 

 peared to inform the visitors (much to the 

 delight of Smythe) that "President McKee 

 will now see Mr. Osbom." 



Osbom was a typologist and a "split- 

 ter"; he thought that comparisons among 

 specimens should be taken right back to 

 the types on which the original descrip- 

 tions of species were made. Matthew, al- 

 lowing for variation within species, was a 

 "lumper," who viewed population sam- 

 ples as a tmer basis for determining spe- 

 cies relationships. These divergent ap- 

 proaches, together with Osborn's 

 orthogenetic ("straight line") concept of 

 evolution, led to the abandonment by 

 Matthew of their joint authorship of a 

 massive monograph on fossil horses to 

 which Matthew had devoted many years 

 of research. 



Far from being overpoweringly forceful 

 in the Osbomian sense, Matthew was none 

 the less a man of sohd convictions, based 

 upon the facts as he saw them in the fossil 

 record. As Gregory wrote of his longtime 

 friend, 



It may be said in brief that Evolution was 

 the one theme about which he was always 

 writing.... He never wearied of insisting 

 upon the value of facts as compared with 

 theories.... Scrupulous intellectual honesty 

 was one of his outstanding characteristics. 



Matthew was a firm believer in the 

 close relationship between environments 

 and the evolution of animals, a belief that 

 found expression in his 1915 publication 

 Climate and Evolution. This work, a mile- 



stone in Matthew's evolutionary studies, 

 attracted universal attention and has been 

 a point of reference, and a subject of de- 

 bate, during the many years since its pub- 

 lication. 



One of his first projects at the American 

 Museum was a comprehensive synthesis 

 of the Cenozoic strata in North America 

 within which fossil mammals are to be 

 found. With his background of geologic 

 knowledge, Matthew saw the evolution of 

 horses, for example, differently than did 

 Osbom. Realizing that primitive horses 

 were closely related to primitive rhinocer- 

 oses and tapirs, all of which are found 

 within strata of the Eocene age (some fifty 

 million years ago), Matthew studied the 

 Cenozoic mammals as they were spread 

 out in space, as well as over time. He was 

 as concemed with the worldwide distribu- 

 tion of mammaUan faunas as he was with 

 the lines of descent of particular species. 



Consequently much of Matthew's re- 

 search was based upon the geologic for- 

 mations of the westem United States, with 

 which he became thoroughly acquainted 

 during successive seasons of fieldwork. 

 His analysis of the fossils resulted in his 

 early great monograph on the ancient car- 

 nivorous and insectivorous mammals of 

 the Bridger Basin of Wyoming. His 

 crowning work — a huge monograph on 

 primitive mammals from the Paleocene 

 strata of the San Juan Basin of New Mex- 

 ico — was also based on assiduous field- 

 work as well as Museum study. 



Matthew was a witty person, who rev- 

 eled in the world's absiu^dities. He was a 

 great versifier, and wrote many ditties for 

 the amusement of his colleagues, such as: 



Darwinian Thoughts on Viewing a 

 Skeleton of Eryops 



From Palaeozoic slime he rose. 



Your ancestor and mine. 



With webby toes, 



Retrousse nose 



And, I suppose, a lateral line. 



Gregory's characterization of Matthew 

 as a man of "scmpulous intellectual hon- 

 esty" could well be appUed to Gregory I \ 

 himself. Although he was an assistant to 

 Osbom for many years, and although in 

 1910 he took over Osbom's position as 

 professor at Columbia (in addition to his 

 curatorial duties at the Museum), he did 

 not submit to Osbom's overwhelming per- 

 sonality. He expressed his own opinions, 

 particularly with regard to evolution, but 

 he had the knack of doing so in a way that 

 did not mffle the Osbomian feathers. He 

 would address a memo to Osbom "to our 



64 Natural History 5/94 



