nel, assigns to these their undertakings, and decides upon the proper distribution of the results of excavations among those scientific establishments best qualified to receive them. After consultation with the Administrative Council in regard to ways and means, it decides upon the various publications of the Institute and determines the regulations for the laboratories and libraries.

Under the original organization the Institute selected a number of the most distinguished scientists in France to conduct its explorations and carry on its researches. With a personnel including such experts as Marcellin Boule in palæontology, Verneau in anatomy, and Cartailhac and Breuil in archæology, no surprise can be felt at the brilliant results which are already the fruit of their labors during the few years that have passed since the inception of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine through the scientific ardor and wise judgment of the Prince of Monaco. NATURAL HISTORY will from time to time publish abstracts and reports of the latest work of the Institute.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the researches and publications of the eight years elapsing since its foundation mark a new epoch in anthropology. On the anatomical side, Boule in a masterly manner has described the Neanderthaloid characteristics in his monograph on La Chapelle-aux-Saints; Verneau has studied the skeletal remains of the Cro-Magnon artists in a very complete way, although there is still much to be done on this race; Breuil has covered the marvelous field of palæolithic art of France and Spain and has firmly established the connection between the stages of its development and the respective stages of the flint industry; the relatively unknown period of the Aurignacian flint culture has been fully studied, and Breuil and Obermaier have connected the art of Spain with that of France, and the Aurignacian and "Capsian" culture of Spain with that of Africa.

The Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man held its first meeting in New York on April 17, 1918,

when the object of the Society was outlined and especial emphasis laid on the importance of cooperative effort on the part of specialists, so that the problems to be considered might be studied from widely diverse lines of approach. In addition to the original charter members, comprising Madison Grant, Henry Fairfield Osborn, John C. Merriam, Edward L. Thorndike, William K. Gregory, Charles B. Davenport, George S. Huntington, J. Howard McGregor, and Edwin G. Conklin, there have been added at subsequent meetings the following fellows: Ernest A. Hooton, Peabody Museum; Gerrit Smith Miller, United States National Museum; Raymond Pearl, United States Food Administration; L. R. Sullivan, American Museum of Natural History; Frederick Tilney, Columbia University; Harris H. Wilder, Smith College; Clark Wissler, American Museum of Natural History; and Nels C. Nelson, American Museum of Natural History. Two patrons were elected: Mrs. E. H. Harriman and Mr. M. Taylor Pyne, New York.

At the five meetings so far held significant addresses have been contributed by Professor McGregor, Dr. Wissler, Dr. Sullivan, Professor Davenport, Professor Merriam, and Professor Huntington; and the opportunity afforded for informal mutual discussion of the problems presented already justifies the hopes of its founders that the Galton Society might constitute a symposium of specialists qualified to consider the origin and evolution of man from widely different points of view. The Society has resolved to establish a laboratory to be known as the Galton Laboratory, in furtherance of its objects, and a committee is now considering plans for this project. Many of the members are at present engaged in special investigations within the field of the Society's interests and it is planned that a suitable medium of publication for the scientific and educational documents of the Society shall be secured. A special object of the Society is to encourage the establishment of courses in anthropology in universities, colleges, and other centers of education.

NO THE EDITOR OF NATURAL HISTORY:

T

Dr. W. D. Matthew in his admirable little pamphlet on the Dinosaurs 1 thinks their progenitors in late Palæozoic time were small animals like the modern lizards in size, appearance, and habitat; he adds in a footnote that if "some vast catastrophe should today blot out all the mammalian races including man, and the birds, but leave the lizards and other reptiles still surviving, with the lower animals and plants, we might well expect the lizards in the course of geologic periods to evolve into a great and varied land fauna like the Dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era."

Each

Is not this an astonishing statement? If Mesozoic times could be brought back and the earth, air, and waters be in every way as they were in that era, this might happen but, in my opinion, not otherwise. Does not the evolutionary impulse run its course? Can or will it repeat itself? It is another world today, from surface to center. geologic era had its typical life-forms. The dinosaurs appeared in different parts of the world in the same era, as Doctor Matthew says, and "the cutting off of the Dinosaur dynasty was nearly, if not quite simultaneous the world over." These monsters of the primeval world were highly specialized to meet special conditions, and these 1 Dinosaurs. By W. D. Matthew, Ph.D. December, 1915.

conditions can never again return to the earth. We still have reptiles but they are insignificant and cut no figure in the life of the globe. That the huge Brontosaurus, for instance, could ever reappear in the Age of Mammals is unthinkable. The Age of the dinosaurs covered about nine million years and its end is now at least three million years behind us. Can we believe that the life of the different periods was as accidental and unrelated as Doctor Matthew's statement would seem to imply?

Might not one as well declare that were our deciduous trees and plants and all exogens swept away, the mosses and ferns and horsetails and ground pines would again produce the tremendous growth of cryptogamous plants that gave us the main part of our coal measures, producing calamites thirty or forty feet high, lycopods sixty to ninety feet high, giant sigillarias, lepidodendrons, and others?

"Amelioration is one of the earth's words," says our poet of the cosmos, Whitman, and it is as true in science as it is in poetry. The earth has developed and ripened, hanging like fruit on the great sidereal tree, and can no more repeat the stages it has passed through, than can any other fruit or growing thing.

[Signed] JOHN BURROUGHS. Riverby, West Park, New York.

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HE footnote to which Mr. Burroughs refers came very near being cut out of the manuscript before it was printed, as a speculative and fanciful supposition that had no place in a brief summary of what is known about dinosaurs. It was left in chiefly because such speculations have for me a certain fascination, and I thought it might be the same way with others. That Mr. Burroughs has picked it out from its lowly position for comment and criticism shows that he, too, finds it of interest.

From the standpoint of the older concepts of cosmic and geologic history his objections are undoubtedly valid. If we believe that the earth has been gradually cooling off during geologic time, the atmosphere becoming less warm, humid, and loaded with carbonic acid gas, the seas cooler, the climate changing from a moist, tropical uniform condition to the cooler, drier, zonal climates that prevail today, then undoubtedly one would conclude that whatever were the ultimate result of the supposititious case I raised, it would not be

the evolution of lizards into a fauna paralleling the dinosaurs.

But these geologic concepts cannot be reconciled with the evidence of glacial periods in the Permian, in the pre-Cambrian, and even farther back in geologic time, nor with various other lines of evidence. The geologic theory, which I outlined briefly in the introductory pages of the Dinosaur handbook, conceives of the physical condition of the earth's surface as passing through a series of cyclic changes in climate, topography, and other factors that constitute the physical environment to which life is adapted, but without any very fundamental permanent change during geologic time. The recurring cycles bring about a recurrence of the physical environment sufficiently identical to condition substantially similar adaptations.

It is of course different with the biotic environment, the fauna and flora, which equally condition the trend and scope of evolution of any one group. This has changed in a generally progressive way, since there are certain factors in adaptation and specialization which operate independently of changing physical environment, certain upward steps that, once attained under its stimulus, are retained as advantageous under all circumstances. The physical environment is cyclic, but the biotic evolution moves in a spiral, reaching corresponding but higher points with each recurrent cycle of climatic change.

The physical conditions at the beginning of the Mesozoic when the dinosaurs arose, were much like those of the present day. The earth had just passed through a glacial period, believed to be quite as intense and widespread as that from which we have just emerged. The continents were extended to or even beyond their present limits, arid climates prevailed widely through their interior as they do now, and probably cold climates at the poles. The atmospheric and climatic conditions cannot have been very different from what they now are; whether the outlines of the continents were substantially the same or not, makes no difference to the problem in hand. The physical environment does substantially correspond at the present time to that under which the dinosaurs arose.

The animals and plants are widely different. The presence of higher types of

vertebrates prevents the lizards or any lower vertebrates from expanding into a varied fauna of large land animals as were the dinosaurs. They are unable to compete with the higher types save in certain special fields to which these last are not well adapted. My supposition involved the removal of this competition by extinction of all higher vertebrates, leaving a free field for the lizards such as was open to the lizard-like ancestors of the dinosaurs.

It may well be objected that the evolution of the dinosaurs was conditioned by the nature of the vegetation quite as much as by the competing animal types. The higher types of plant life now prevalent would bring about a different trend and scope of evolutionary progress among lizards in our supposititious case than occurred with the dinosaurs. Probably this objection is valid to some extent, and certainly as to any detailed correspondence. But I do not think it would prevent a marked general correspondence. For the dinosaurs in fact passed through two distinct periods of evolution and expansion, the first in the early Mesozoic, which culminated in the late Jurassic dinosaurian fauna, and the second in the late Mesozoic culminating in the upper Cretaceous dinosaurs.

The first evolution was correlated with a flora lacking the higher plants (angiosperms) now dominant, but the second with a flora very like that of the present day, the herbaceous perennials being the most significant element lacking. These two dinosaur faunas correspond in a broad way; they include armored and unarmored dinosaurs, bipedal and quadrupedal types, great and small carnivorous forms, terrestrial and amphibious adaptations; but similar or equivalent adaptations occur in many cases of different races. There is little correspondence in detail; yet the place they occupied in nature was substantially the same, and there is a great deal of parallelism in their adaptations. We do not find any of the gigantic Sauropoda, Brontosaurus and its allies, in this later fauna. But their place as an amphibious adaptation was taken by the wading and swimming trachodonts. The armored dinosaurs of the Cretaceous are like those of the Jurassic only in the fact that they were gigantic and heavily armor-clad. The unarmored herbivorous dry-land dwellers were even more

contrasted in detail. Only in the carnivorous dinosaurs is there any near correspondence and relationship.

It would seem therefore that the evolution of dinosaurian types of specialization is not tied to the more ancient flora, and that so far as this objection is concerned it would not prevent the lizards from evolving in the absence of higher animal types into a varied fauna of large land animals paralleling the Cretaceous dinosaurs in a broad way, although doubtless as different from them in detail as they are from the Jurassic dino

saurs.

That they or some other group of lower vertebrates might in the course of further geologic periods give rise to higher types corresponding as to their place in nature to birds, mammals and man is conceivable, but too speculative for discussion. Their limitations in brain, in circulation of the blood, etc., would first have to be overcome, and so far as palæontology can teach us this is a vastly slower progress than the expansive evolution into large specialized and varied faunal adaptations.

Certainly such an expansive evolution of the lizards with their higher competitors removed would not cause the huge Brontosaurus to reappear on earth. But it might -if we accept the modern theory of geologic history-bring about the appearance of gigantic wading or amphibious reptiles equally huge and equally innocuous, al

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though probably not at all like a Brontosaur in appearance.

It would seem equally true that under our modern tenets we must be prepared to believe that were all the higher plants swept out of existence the lower plants would proceed under physical environment corresponding to that of the late Paleozoic to evolve into specializations with a broad general resemblance to the Carboniferous flora. They would not reproduce calamites and sigillarias, but they would produce something to take their place, probably no less gigantic and impressive.

This aspect of adaptive evolution receives many illustrations from the fauna and flora of oceanic islands and isolated continents, where, in the absence of certain higher types of animals or plants, certain lower types are evolved and specialized to take their place. The adaptive evolution of marsupials in Australia or of the Tertiary mammals of South America, affords notable instances. Such adaptive parallelism sometimes results in a curiously close imitation or correspondence of particular types; more often the correspondence in habits and in position in the economy of nature leads to a resemblance only in certain parts and a wide difference in other parts of the animal.

[Signed] W. D. MATTHEW. American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

IT is with profound regret that the American Museum records the death, on April 25, of one of its Trustees, Augustus D. Juilliard. Mr. Juilliard, who was senior member of A. D. Juilliard and Company, has been before the public for many years as a patron of art and science. He left several bequests to carry on the work in which he has been personally interested, including a gift to the American Museum of one hundred thousand dollars.

OWING to the lateness in publication and especially to the very greatly increased cost of engraving and printing still effective from war times, the American Museum is combining its last two spring issues of NATURAL HISTORY in this number. Also, because of the prohibitive expense of prepara

tion, it will reduce somewhat the number of pages in the three fall issues, and will omit statements of the institution's work and membership, and advertisement of its publications-except in so far as such matter can be carried on the inside cover pages.

AN account of the library of the University of Louvain and of the sack of the city and the wanton destruction of this ancient collection of manuscripts and books was written and partly printed during the early days of the German occupation, by Ed. de Moreau, S.J., but it has only recently seen publication after lying hidden from the German police four and a half years. The library, with its treasures of manuscripts, incunabula, and literary, historical, and scientific collections which were burned

in the incendiary fire of March 25, 1914, had a long and glorious history. The university itself was founded in 1425 and in the next century ranked as one of the foremost scientific institutions of Europe until suppressed during the French Revolution. In 1913, 2855 students attended the univer sity and it was reported that the library at that time contained 250 incunabula and be tween 120,000 and 230,000 volumes (M. Moreau quotes the latter figure as too low) in addition to a larger number of manuscripts of ancient and mediæval authors. A movement is under way among the world's universities to rehabilitate the library, but, as M. Moreau says, "The library of Louvain cannot be restored, for the library was formed day by day in intimate association with the history of the University, and this history cannot be restored to it."

The Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O., Capt., 25th Royal Fusiliers, who, according to Roosevelt, was "the greatest of the world's big-game hunters," has recently been written by J. G. Millais. Mr. Millais is himself a noted author, artist, and naturalist, and brings to his task a personal appreciation of the work of Selous. The volume is enriched with a beautiful set of illustrative drawings.

Selous went to Africa at the early age of nineteen, where he resided for the most part until 1897, hunting big game and fighting in the Matebele Wars. His later years he spent lecturing, writing, collecting in Europe and America, and elephant hunting in Africa. In 1915 Selous took part with the Royal Fusiliers in the invasion of German East Africa where he lost his life while leading an attack against the German fort at Behobeho on January 4, 1917. Roosevelt said of him: "No other hunter alive has had the experience of Selous, and, so far as I now recall, no hunter of anything like his experience has ever also possessed his gift of penetrating observation joined to his power of vivid and accurate narration." The biographer has faithfully scanned the public and private writings of the great hunter, especially his correspondence with Roosevelt, for notes on African natural history.

"THE Old Humanities and the New Science" was the subject of the presidential

address before the Classical Association (England) delivered by Sir William Osler, regius professor of medicine at Oxford. Sir William, according to Nature, pointed out the necessity of a well-rounded education in which would be found a union of science and the humanities. There is, however, he pointed out, a marked need of revision of the present classical instruction at the English universities which should aim to inspire in the student some of the spirit of the classics rather than to raise up a race of philologists.

Sir William also opened at Oxford a loan exhibition of ancient manuscripts and instruments illustrating the scientific history of Oxford. The earliest were two Persian and Moorish astrolabes dated A.D. 977 and 1067. There are exhibited a microscope of 1693, and a slide rule dated 1635 which is probably the oldest in existence.

DR. PATTON in his article in this number of NATURAL HISTORY (page 405) on Thomas Jefferson, the great statesman, who was also the advocate of science and friend of naturalists, makes us admire the force of Meriwether Lewis, the young leader of an expedition across the western plains and mountains to the Pacific. James Lane Allen (page 397) brings to our understanding and sympathy young Alexander Wilson of the same period of pioneer life in America-but we gain no hint of the interlocking of the interests and lives of the two young men. If we follow the young naturalist and the young explorer only a few years further, with just a matter-of-fact statement of events, our interest is not decreased: Wilson desired keenly to go as ornithologist on the expedition with Lewis through the unknown West, but his letter to Jefferson and that of his naturalist friend, William Bartram, for some unknown reason did not bring response. The expedition proceeded (1805) and Wilson remained in Philadelphia. Wilson quoted Lewis in his first volume of American Ornithology (1808) regarding the distribution of the blue jay on the Missouri. Lewis returned in honor and became governor of Louisiana. Wilson, at his own expense and alone, made his most difficult expedition through the southern country to New Orleans, on which he contracted disease