No. 385.] GEORGE BAUR S LIFE AND WRITINGS. 19 
the list of his writings. None of his works are of considerable 
length, many of them are mere notices, but prolixity is not one 
of their faults. He often condensed much patient research, 
both in the laboratory and the library, into an astonishingly 
small space. He cannot always be excused from the fault of 
publishing too hastily and having subsequently to change his 
opinions. Nor did he always succeed in maintaining his ground - 
against his opponents without undue emphasis and unpleasant- 
ness of expression. This unpleasantness of expression was 
unintentional, however; being due to a certain abruptness in 
the use of the English language. Most of his papers appeared 
in a comparatively small number of journals, many of them in 
the American Naturalist and the Zoologischer Anzeiger. 
Dr. Baur’s inaugural dissertation on the tarsus of birds and 
Dinosaurs is the keynote to much of his later work. It begins 
with a study of the developing limb skeleton of the bird and 
branches out into a comparative study of the limbs of the 
extinct Dinosaurs. The closing paragraph of the paper seems 
to contain the germ of his later views on the origin of variation, 
views which were practically identical with those of the Neo- 
Lamarckian school. In this paragraph he maintains that the 
appendages of oviparous animals are more variable than those 
of ovo-viviparous and viviparous forms, “as a viviparous animal 
which develops in the uterus, far from disturbing external influ- 
ences, especially those of a mechanical nature, when born ex- 
hibits a tolerably truthful picture of its ancestors, since what 
it possesses at birth is inherited. An oviparous animal, on the 
other hand, will present a much less truthful picture of its 
ancestry,” etc. Dr. Baur would probably have dissented from 
this crude view in after years, but he never altogether abandoned 
the assumption that variations in living organisms are traceable 
to the inherited effects of the environment. 
Dr. Baur made the Reptilia the center of his researches in 
paleontology and osteology. His thorough and extensive knowl- 
edge of the diversified structure of living and fossil reptiles 
enabled him to arrive at very correct conclusions respecting 
mooted questions in the osteology of the fishes on the one hand, 
and the birds and mammals on the other. Dr. O. P. Hay, who 
