FOREST AND STREAM 
A WEEKLY JOURNAL, 
DIVOTBD TO FIELD AND AQUATIC SPORTS, PRACTICAL NATURAL HISTORY, 
Fish Culture, thb Protection op G ame, Preservation op Forests, 
and the Inculcation in Men and Women of a Hralthy Interest 
in Out^Doob Recreation and Study : 
PUBLISHED BY 
forest and gfreanj publishing (gamgagg.. 
— AT— 
NO. Ill (Old No. 103) FULTON 8TREET, NEW YORK. 
[Post Office Box 2S38.) 
TERMS, FOUR DOLLARS A YEAR, STRICTLY IN ADVANCE. 
Twenty -live per cent, off tor Clubs of Two or more. 
Advertising Rates. 
inside pages, nonpareil type, 28 cents per line ; outside page, 40 cents. 
Special rates for three, six and twelve months. Notices In editorial 
ooiomns, 60 cents per line— eight wordB to the line, and twelve lines to 
one Inch. 
Advertisements should be sent In by Saturday of eaoh weet:, If pos- 
■lble. 
aii transient advertisements must be accompanied with the money 
or they will not be Inserted. 
No advertisement or business notice of an immoral character will be 
received on any terms. 
• # * Any publisher Inserting our prospectus as above one time, with 
brief editorial notice calling attention thereto, and sending marked copy 
to us, will receive the Forest and Stream for one year. 
NEW YORK, THURSDAY, JULY 25, 1878. 
To Correspondents. 
ah commnnlcatlons whatever, Intended for publication, most be ac- 
companied with real name of the writer as a guaranty of good faith 
and be addressed to the Forest and Stream Publishing Company. 
Names will not be published If objection be made. No anonymous com- 
munications will be regarded. 
We cannot promise to return rejected manuscripts. 
Secretaries of Clubs and Associations are urged to favor os with brief 
notes of their movements and transactions. 
Nothing will be admitted to any department of the paper that may 
not be read with propriety In the home circle. 
We cannot be responsible for dereliction of the mall service If money 
remitted to ns Is lost. No person whatever Is authorized to colled 
money for os onless he can show authentic credentials from one of the 
undersigned. We have no Philadelphia agent. 
tw Trade supplied by American News Company. 
CHARLES I1ALLOCK, Editor. 
T. C. BANKS, 8. H. TURRILL, Chicago, 
Business Manager. Western Manager. 
CALENDAR OF EVENTS FOR THE COMING 
WEEK. 
Friday, July 586. — ' Trotting at Cleveland, O., and Providence, R. I. 
Banning meeting at Saratoga. Base ball : Worcester vs Buffalo, at 
Buff *lo ; Manchester vs Star, at Syracuse ; Hoboken vs Amatenr, at 
Centennial Grounds. 
Saturday, July 27.— Beverly Yacht Club Regatta of Swampscott. 
Running meeting at Saratoga. Base ball : Chicago vs Indianapolis, at 
Chicago ; Cincinnati vs Boston, at Boston ; Milwaukee vs Providence, 
at Providence; Manchester vs Star, at Syracuse ; Sprlnglleld vs Roch- 
ester, at Rochester; Worcester vs Horaell, at Hornellsvllle; Jersey 
City vs Wltoka, at Jersey City; Montgomery vs Astor, at Union 
Grounds. ; 
Tuesday, July 30.— Trotting at Westminster, Md.; Buffalo, N. Y. 
Freeport, IU.; BuUlvan, 111. Running meetlDg at Saratoga. 
Wednesday, July 31.— Trotting and running meetlDg as above. 
Thursday, Aug. 1 .— Trotting and running as above. 
—Eighteen feet steam yachts, *250. 
Geo. F. Shedd, Waltham, Mass.— [Adv. 
To the Nobth Pole. — James Gordon Bennett, on his re- 
turn to the United States, Is fully occupied with the many de- 
tails of his expedition to the North Pole. From a communi- 
cation addressed by him to the Navy Department, it seems 
that a double expedition is contemplated, one by Behrings 
8traits and the other by the Bpi'zbergen. In addition to the 
Jeannette, the Dauntless is to be fitted out- Possibly as much 
as $150,000 will be expended by Mr. Bennett in this double 
enterprise. Mr. Bennett wishes the Navy Department to fur- 
nish the crew, officers and provisions for the Dauntless. 
Petermann, the celebrated German geographer, has given the 
benefit of his council. The Dauntless is a staunch vessel, 
and with the engine and screw with which Mr. Bennett pro- 
poses to fit her, at his own expense, would be an excellent 
craft for the Arctic voyage. The same liberality which was 
given to African exploration will certainly be tendered by 
Mr. Bennett in the Arctic expedition. If, through the energy 
of the proprietor of the New York Herald, at last the ultima 
?tuU bo arrived at, it will be a crowning achievement. 
THE FLYING DRAGONS OF THE WEST. 
H OW marvelous are the revelations of paleontology ? It 
is one of the most interesting branches of modern 
science, and the discoveries made by its followers within the 
past twenty years have done more, perhaps, than those in any 
other field to change the scientific thought of the age, and to 
establish beyond any question the great truths of the develop- 
ment theory. It is in America that the most surprising strides 
have recently been made in this department of science, and 
they have been important not only in themselves, but also in 
their bearing on the beliefs of a very large class of the non- 
scientific public. Did not Professor Huxley, the first of 
anatomists, when he lectured before a New York audience, 
draw his demonstrative evidence of evolution from American 
specimens and American facts ? The genealogical line of the 
horse, with which all our readers are of course familiar, 
without McsoMppus, Orohippus and Eohippus to carry it back 
from the middle Miocene to the earliest Eocene, would be in- 
complete indeed. How wonderful are the Dinocerata, those 
gigantic herbivores with their six horns and their long trench- 
ant tusks shaped like those of the walrus ! The Tillodontiawe 
not less strange. What a curious combination of characters ; 
were they the first of Edentates, or a side branch of the 
Rodents that blossomed out so strangely only to become ex- 
tinct? We do not know. All is as yet vague and indistinct, 
but when the material has all been worked up and the rela- 
tionships of all these strange forms determined, as who can 
doubt they will be, how interesting will be the story which 
will be told us of their lives ! More thrilling than any t ale of 
love or war that was ever recited. 
The discoveries made in the Cretaceous formation are not 
less wonderful than those of the Tertiary. From these beds 
came the Toothed Birds, a sketch of whose history recently 
appeared in the columns of Forest and Stream. These have 
an especial interest since they form, as has already been 
shown, a connecting link between the birds of to-day and the 
reptiles. But, besides these, many forms lived and flourished 
in the greatest abundance which have now no living repre- 
sentatives, and to appreciate which requires, in the mind of 
one who has given no special attention to the subject, a con- 
siderable exercise of the imagination. Such were the strange 
Mosasauroid reptiles, a group which occurs sparingly in 
Europe, but in the greatest abundance in the wide inland 
Cretaceous sea which once covered so large a portion of what 
is now the United States. These huge reptiles were perhaps 
more nearly like the fabled sea serpent of the present day 
than anything else, but had fore and hind paddles somewhat 
resembling the flippers of a whale. In length they varied 
from ten to sixty feet, their wide-gaping jaws bristled with 
loDg and sharp pointed teeth, and they were well defended 
against the attacks of their enemies by an armor of bony 
dermal scutes. Thus armed and protected they must have 
proved formidable antagonists to the most ferocious of their 
marine companions, and we can easily imagine that even the 
gigantic sharks of that day would have avoided an encounter 
with these monarchs of the ocean. 
But if these creatures excite our wonder how much more 
do the Pterodactyls, the moDarchs of the air ? These were 
large flying reptiles which lived in great numbers about the 
islands and shores of the Cretaceous ocean which the Mosa- 
saurs inhabited, and their remains are found very abundantly 
entombed in the yellow chalk which once formed its muddy 
bottom. They were of various sizes, and the huge leathery 
wings of the largest species, when expanded, measured twen- 
ty-five feet from tip to tip. The membrane which supported 
the Pterodactyls in flight was apparently similar to that of a 
bat’s wing. Of course, as it consisted merely of skin, it has 
never been found preserved with the bones, and in only one 
specimen, from Europe, has any trace of it ever been detected. 
The Eichstadt Pterodactyl found in the beautifully smooth 
lithographic stone of Bavaria, shows, owing to the favorable 
conditions of its preservation, the impression of this membrane, 
and thus confirms the conclusion previously reached by biol- 
ogists as to its character. Although in a general way bat- 
like, the Pterodactyl wing is peculiar. The bat’s wiDg is 
formed by the four outer fingers being turned downward and 
outward, and greatly elongated, so that they supported the 
skinny membrane of the wing like the ribs of an umbrella ; 
that of the Plerosauria, on the other hand, is upheld by the 
fourth, or, as it is called to distinguish it from the other digits, 
which are short and armed with sharp claws, the wing finger. 
This is greatly developed, and the membrane, when the wing 
is expanded, is stretched along this finger, the side of the 
animal and its hind leg. 
The bony skeleton of these curious reptiles is of the utmost 
lightness consistent with strength. The bones are hollow, 
and their walls are often scarcely thicker than paper. From 
this it results that they are never found whole, but are always 
more or less crushed or flattened by the weight of the mass of 
earth beneath which they have been buried for so many ages. 
Remains of Pterosaurs are abundant in the deposits of 
the Mesozoic age in Europe, being found from the Lias up 
through the Chalk ; the only ones known from American 
strata, however, are those discovered in the Cretaceous forma- 
tion of Kansas. The European Pterodactyls were all com- 
paratively small, and the bodies of the largest of them was 
hardly greater than that of a cat. All of them had teeth, 
while in no American Plerosauria have any trace of teeth 
been found, and it may safely be said that these toothless 
forms are the last stage in the development of this extraordi- 
nary group before it became extinct. The oldest of the 
European forms, Dimorpliodon, had the entire jaws armed 
with teeth, and had a long tail. The genus Pterodaclylus,. 
which lived later, had almost entirely lost the tail, but re- 
tained the teeth, while Ramphorhynchu $ had retained thc- 
elongated tail, but had lost the teeth from the front of each 
jaw. In the American genus Pteranodon there are, as has 
been said, no traces of teeth, and the tail is merely a rudiment. 
As suggested by Prof. Marsh, these reptiles seem to have 
followed the same path as the birds in loss of tail and teeth. 
The resemblance is merely a superficial one, however, and 
must not lead any one to suppose that the affinities of this 
group were with the birds. The reverse is true ; for a study 
of the more important characters of the Plerosauria renders 
it at once clear that they are a remarkably aberrant type of 
true reptiles, totally off the line through which the birds were 
developed. 
The problem as to how the American Pterodactyls lived;, 
and what were their habits, is one which has not yet been solved; 
by the paleontologist. We can easily conceive how the smaller 
European genera might capture animals of considerable size 
and strength, for they were strongly built, and their long* 
sharp teeth would be effective instruments with which to killi 
small mammals, birds or fishes. But the American forms, so 
far as known, lacked any weapons whatever, and their great 
size must be counted against them in “ the struggle for exist- 
ence." An animal with a spread of wings of twenty-five feet 
would require a considerable amount of food, and front the 
general weakness of the structure of the skeleton of Pterano- 
don, it seems a fair inference that this food was not secured 
by the exercise of strength, but was either dead food or con- 
sisted of minute organisms. 
These questions cannot now be answered, but, happily, 
there is at] present in our Museums a very large amount of 
material, the study of which will, no doubt, throw much light 
on all such doubtful points ; and we may look hopefully for- 
ward to the day when the ancient fauaa of Cretaceous times 
will be thoroughly understood, and all its apparent contradic- 
tions explained. 
CORINTHIAN PRINCIPLES. 
A S a number of yacht clubs contemplate getting under 
way and cruising in squadron during the coming month 
a few remarks, having in view the furtherance of seamanship 
and navigation, will not come amiss. From our yachting 
columns it will be seen that those gentlemen who are wont to 
lead in the sport are in full accord with ourselves on the im- 
portance of eliminating as far as possible everything that 
smacks of the professional racing hack from our amateur 
tars. Not that we would abolish altogether the sailing cap- 
tain and his hired crew— for they are often indispensable in 
their way— but uo one will question the propriety of induct- 
ing the amateur rather deeper into the science and skill re- 
quired to navigate his own yacht with safety and dueecenomy. 
Too many of the favored ones, whose purses have no sound- 
ings, carry on the sport simply as a sort of traveling pastime, 
and look upon their craft as luxurious means of conveyance 
concerning the management of which it is not their business 
to inquire. We are happy to say that of late a marked 
change for the better seems to have set in, and if the current 
is not yet at full tide, we trust that, through the efforts in 
the right direction of many leading spirits of the sport, and 
such aid as we can ourselves extend, the time may not be far 
distant when the sailing-captain will no longer be sailing- 
masler, and the owner may know enough to skipper captain 
and crew himself, and to get his money’s worth. It is not 
necessary that the gentleman amateur should crawl in at the 
hawse-pipe and work his way aft to the quarter-deck, nor 
need he deem himself a lubber because he may never have 
scraped down spars, slushed and tarred his rigging, or holy- 
stoned decks— though certainly there can be uo harm even in 
learning things from the lowest rung up ; but none can claim 
the title of yachtsman who cannot sail and navigate their ves- 
sels in any kind of weather and in any kind of water with 
out giving up the trumpet or their trick at the wheel as soon 
as it comes on to blow a little stiff, or when in a ticklish 
channel with lights around you as thick as candles round a 
birthday cake. On the coming cruises may yachtsmen im- 
prove their opportunities to the best. Post up before you go 
afloat on the parts you propose to visit. Take down your 
sailing directions and chart ; practice laying out courses ; al- 
low for tides and variations ; look up the barometer, log and 
lead, and take bearings with an azimuth of objects all round 
the compass ; note the times of flood and ebb ; examine spe- 
cial local currents and counter currents. Look to it that you 
can make with ease and readiness something more than a 
“ granny’s knot ’’ or a clove-hitch ; learn to know every rope 
in your ship, so that you may find them in the dark, and 
lead out the gear for your crew, while, of course, such ele- 
mentary matters as makmg and taking in sail, furling, reef- 
ing, loosing to dry, tacking, wearing, jibing, etc., should be 
at your fingers' ends, in practice as well as in theory. When 
you don't know a thing be not ashamed to ask — it is the only 
way to learn. Above all, let the flag officers encourage actual 
seamanship and navigation, and cultivate an esprit de corps 
and feeling of emulation among their brother yachtsmen, so 
that when the cruise winds up there may have been some- 
thing learned and something to remember more gratifying to 
your pride as sailors than a mere recount of places visited, 
hops attended and fair hearts lost and won. 
