1890.] Scientific News. 389 
you work in a crack or two to give it a natural look?” “‘ Just run a 
suture along here, and scrape that process there to make it look like 
the roughnesses for cartilaginous or ligamentous attachment.”’ 
At first the plaster worked badly, for many of the bones were black, 
and to get that color in white plaster it was necessary to add such 
quantities of lamp-black (with alcohol to make it mix with the water) 
that the restored parts were soft and crumbled away. To overcome 
this, glue water was added, which gave hardness, but like all glue was 
treacherous, drying, cracking, scaling off and pulling away from its 
moorings, thus exposing too clearly just where the fossil left off and 
the fraud began. It was not until he had learned how to combine 
plaster, bone-black, and gum acacia, that a mixture capable of un- 
limited possibilities wasadopted. Were it possible, I would say, Verify 
these words,—but you can’t. Stand straight before these restored speci- 
mens, in the full and truthful light of day, and you can’t distinguish 
between the rusty, frost-cracked, weather-beaten, moss and lichen 
effects, craftily wrought in the plaster, and the conditions wrought by 
time on the specimens themselves. But if critical study can reveal— 
without the helpful sponge—the restored parts in some bones, it can’t 
in others, some of which were prepared by myself, at his direction, 
in my earlier days on the Survey, and are so craftly modeled and 
colored that I cannot myself distinguish at arm’s length the real fossil 
from the plaster. Of course the deceits and falsities of the specimens 
thus tampered with were naturally enough transmitted to the drawings, 
and the old deceits and falsehoods were enacted anew—compromising 
that pre-eminently reliable Journal. Yes, still a third time, in the 
costly plates of the government monographs, thence to be copied and 
repeated in other ways, how often who will say ?—for a falsehood is 
proliferous and self-propagating. If the deceptions thus practised were 
confined to the specimens themselves, and not transmitted to paper 
and then distributed throughout the world, it would not seem so serious 
an evil. As it is, the Geological Survey must necessarily suffer reproach 
either now or in the future. 
Geologists abroad who cannot acquaint themselves personally with 
the facts, may find in the above an explanation of the striking 
absence in Professor Marsh’s plates of those conventional bars, light 
shading, and simple outlines which fair-minded scientists universally 
use to honestly indicate missing parts. In very marked contrast to 
his course is that of foreign geologists, and our own paleontologists. 
Their plates show things as they actually are, and are not daubed with 
plaster to enlarge, distort, or conceal anything at the caprice of the 
