THE FOUR-TOED HORSE, FOUR HANDS HIGH, FOUND IN THE WASATCH LAKE OF THE BIG HORN MOUNTAINS, situdes and emotions. The fossil-hunter is The country that is as hot as Hades, watered by stagnant alkali pools, is almost invariably the richest in fossils. Here, in fact, as you find the greatest variety and number of bones, you enjoy the most delightful flights of the scientific imagination; when parched and burned, you conjure before you the glories of these ancient lakes. About their shores alligators such a vision of one or two million years back, so far as his eye fell only upon the alligator and the garpike, and upon equally conservative trees and plants, which have not changed from that day to this. The streams and bayous would seem familiar. The only landscape features strange to his eye would be the low ranges of hills, the embryonic Uintah and Rocky Mountains. We can imagine his repose beside a Bridger stream rudely disturbed by the spring of a huge, otter-like animal upon a half-grown alligator dozing upon the bank. This beast (destined to yield the first fragment of his jaw-bone some eons later to the veteran Joseph Leidy, and to be BY PERMISSION OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. TITANOTHERE FAMILY-BULL, COW, AND CALF-OF THE SOUTH DAKOTA LAKE BASIN. From a mounted skeleton and skulls in the museum. that of a tiger, his brain is little larger than that of a terrier dog, the impression of a wellrounded head being entirely due to the large masses of jaw-muscles between the ears. This lack of brain-power was apparently a costly deficit in the Patriofelis family income; for fine as these animals were in frame and muscular development, they appear to have gone under in the struggle for existence. As the archæologist among the ruins of Nineveh measures his progress by his ability to restore the ancient palaces and temples, dress, habits, and conversation of the Ninevites, so the paleontologist strives to place himself back upon the borders of these old lakes; bones and fossil plants are his cuneiform characters. Let us, therefore, follow behind, but dips in front into two deep flanges which seem to protect the two great upper tusks. Coming up behind this brute is his female companion, distinguished by shorter horns and smaller tusks. She is using her tusks to tear down a branch, when, with a rapid side motion of the head, she rips off the leaves into the broad gape of the mouth. The body is longer, but otherwise like that of an elephant, the limbs and feet being heavy and clumsy. The eye is small and inexpressive, and below the hollow of the space back of it lies relatively the smallest brain known in any warm-blooded animal. The body weighs perhaps two tons, while the brain is about the size of that of a dog, and weighs less than a pound. The ratio of brain weight to body DRAWN BY CHARLES KNIGHT. BY PERMISSION OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. CURSORIAL RHINOCEROS, HYRACODON, OF THE SOUTH DAKOTA LAKE BASIN. 1 1 4000, weight is therefore about 60,' and this gigantic Uintathere is heavily handicapped by his stupidity, and by the very small size of his grinding-teeth. At all events, he is the last of a long-race of animals which arose back in the reptilian period. The next animal one sees is up among a grove of young sequoias, standing over the skull of a Uintathere. He has a very long, low body, somewhat like that of the Tasmanian wolf, terminating in a powerful tail, short limbs, and flattened nails (hence the name Mesonyx, or half-claw, given him by Cope). The wide gape of his mouth exposes a full set of very much blunted teeth, which prove that this huge flesh-eater could himself hardly have killed the Uintathere, but has driven away some other beast from the carcass. Perhaps, like the bear, he had a taste for all kinds of food, or, as Cope has suggested, by his fondness for terrapin he may have blunted his teeth in breaking through the 1 In the fishes this ratio is the lowest, 5000. In man it is the highest, 35. 2 Uintatherium cornutum, Cope. The animal was first named by Leidy. soft-shelled turtles (Trionyx) which are so abundant in this lake. This is another animal with a very small brain, and is also the very last of his race. The modern game exterminator, who shoots everything he sees, and robs Nature of what she has been ages in evolving, may claim that Nature herself sets the example of destruction when he learns that the Uintathere, the Patriofelis, and the Mesonyx were doomed, and never fed or browsed upon the borders of the great Nebraska-Dakota Lake which succeeded the Wyoming-Utah, or Bridger, Lakes which we have been exploring. But the case is really not parallel, for, whereas the wanton hunter leaves no life in his trail, Nature always replaces one form of life by another. If we leave the lake shore, and pass into the drier upland, we discover the clever little four-toed horse, swift, alert, intelligent. He is, to use the modern measure, only four hands, or sixteen inches, high, so he would not reach the knee of the Uintathere, and could be devoured at one sitting by the Patriofelis. His limbs are as slender as pencils. contemporaries is that he learned to browse just about the time that grasses began to appear. He was the animal for the times. The Louisianian would probably not have been more disturbed by earth tremors if he had taken up his residence in Wyoming 2,000,000 B. C., than our New Jerseyman is south into the Uintah Lake of Utah. As this lake was also drained off by the Colorado, and converted into a river-basin, wherein no fossil records are kept, a blank chapter would have occurred in our history but for a decree of Nature which should make every paleontologist grateful to the Creator. By this |