388 The American Naturalist. [April, 
SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 
5. Notes on the Paleontological Laboratory of the United 
States Geological Survey under Professor Marsh. 
If there is any truth left under the sun then judgment must fall 
on the scientist who walks the halls of the Yale Museum armed with 
a wet sponge. Why a wet sponge? you say. Perhaps it was to 
wipe the dust from some noble fossil? Far from it! but rather to 
wash the purity of a truth out of the blackness of a falsehood. A 
kind of organized touchstone that distinguishes the little gold from 
the bulk of dross, which when deftly Swept across the surface of a 
restored fossil, discloses the real and the unreal. For plaster of paris 
is porous, and absorbs more readily than the denser fossil any 
moisture from the sponge. So the blackened sepulchres yield up their 
grewsome skeletons. Veritable sepulchres they necessarily seem to 
those who have seen these fossils « black-washed ” from centrum 
to spine, from shaft to extremities, reducing the whole to a uni- 
formity of color that wiped out absolutely every vestige of the truthful 
white plaster, leaving mankind in doubt as to what is real, what con- 
jectural. This is illegitimate restoration in the eyes of the whole 
world, and these old bones, restored to deceive rather than to instruct, 
must sooner or later stand as monuments of reproach to the man who 
has so far deceived the world and himself that he can only study them 
with a wet sponge. 
To those scientists in foreign lands, especially Germany, who have 
marveled at the exceptional beauty and perfect preservation of Prof. 
Marsh’s specimens, let it be said that although you cannot apply the 
sponge test to his faultless, fractureless plates, you can to the specimens 
from which they were drawn. But to see any man year after year 
calling for a wet sponge to assist him in determining whether a suture 
or a fracture were real or imitations wrought cunningly in the plaster, 
by skilled labor, is to believe him worthy of the unqualified distrust of 
science, wherever that word is spoken. One feels this the more keenly 
when he knows that all his assistants to a man have repeatedly advised 
with him, and cried out against this abuse, warning him of the criti- 
cism inevitably resulting from such a stubbornly unscientific and mis- 
leading course. His assistants are asked, not how nearly they can 
approximate the truth, but instead, ‘‘ How closely can you imitate the 
color and texture in that missing part ?’’ which being translated is, 
How cunningly can you deceive? « That part looks too smooth; can’t 
