THE 



AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 



[FIFTH SERIES.] 



Art. XXXVI. — John Day Felidce in the Marsh Collec- 

 tion;, by George F. Eatox. 



[Contributions from the Othniel Charles Marsh Publication Fund, Peabody 

 Museum, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.] 



To the surviving personal friends of 0. C. Marsh, and 

 also to the younger generation of vertebrate paleontolo- 

 gists, Marsh's eagerness to secure fossils from newly 

 reported localities in the western United States, and the 

 success of the collectors he employed, no longer present 

 any novelty. It need therefore occasion no surprise 

 that the Marsh Collection of Vertebrate Fossils in the 

 Peabody Museum of Yale University should contain a 

 considerable amount of material, from the John Day 

 Valley of Oregon, that was collected principally between 

 the years 1870 and 1877. The present short article is 

 based on that portion of this material from the John Day 

 Valley which includes the Felidae. 



Virile it would be ungracious to criticise the methods 

 of collecting in vogue in the seventies of the last century, 

 it appears that the superior value of a good skull over the 

 other skeletal parts, which were then somewhat dis- 

 paragingly termed "joints," was a little over-emphasized 

 in Marsh's instructions to his collectors. A result of 

 this is possibly to be seen in the predominance of cranial 

 material, unaccompanied by other skeletal parts that 

 might otherwise have been saved, and that would now 

 greatly enhance the value of the collection. Then, too, the 

 stratigraphy of the region was neither so well under- 

 stood nor regarded as of the same importance in con- 

 nection with the search for fossils as it has been of recent 

 years, and accordingly it would be unwise to accept as 

 authoritative, in some instances, the recorded statements 

 of the collectors regarding the horizons from which speci- 

 mens were obtained. For this reason the present article 



Am. Jour. Sci. — Fifth Series, Vol. IV, No. 24.— December, 1922. 

 28 



