NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



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to have studied and discovered remnants of a vanished zoology. 

 As we peruse these pages we feel, as evolutionists, how dim is the 

 past, how unknown the future ; perhaps when we know more of 

 the first we may hazard some guesses as to the second. Mr. 

 Sternberg truly observes that fossil hunting "is as capable of 

 improvement as any other form of human endeavour." Once 

 " we went over, in a few months, all the chalk in Western 

 Kansas. . . . Now it takes us five years to get over the same 

 ground. Then we dug up the bones with a butcher knife or pick, 

 and packed in flour sacks with dry buffalo grass which we pulled 

 with our fingers. Some strange animals were created by Cope 

 and Marsh in those early days, when they attempted to restore 

 a creature from the few disconnected bones thus carelessly 

 collected. Now we take up great slabs of the chalk, so that we 

 can show the bones in situ, that is, in their original matrix, so 

 that they may be the more easily fitted together in their natural 

 relations with each other." 



Some interesting reminiscences of the late Prof. E. D. Cope in 

 the field are given by Mr. Sternberg : — " Cope's indefatigability, 

 too, was a constant source of wonder to us. We were in excellent 

 training, after our strenuous outdoor life in the Kansas chalk- 

 beds, while he had just been working fourteen hours a day in his 

 study and the lithographer's shop, completing a large Govern- 

 ment monograph, writing his own manuscript and reading his 

 own proofs. When we first met him at Omaha he was so weak 

 that he reeled from side to side as he walked ; yet here he 

 climbed the highest cliffs and walked along the most dangerous 

 ledges, working without intermission from daylight until dark." 

 " He used to talk to me by the hour, arranging the living and 

 dead animals of the earth in systematic order." 



Sternberg did not only collect for Cope, but subsequently for 

 Zittel, as the contents of the Munich Museum testify. As an 

 ardent palseontological enthusiast he has not made a fortune by 

 his long service, but he has his reward: "I have accomplished 

 the object which I set before myself as a boy, and have done my 

 humble part towards building up the great science of palae- 

 ontology. I shall perish, but my fossils will last as long as the 

 museums that have secured them." 



