Chapter VIII: Primitive Man; and the Horse, the Lion, and the Elephant (2)

Together with these great beasts belonging to stocks that in recent geologic time had immigrated hither from the Old World and from the southern half of the New World was another huge beast of remote native ancestry. This was a giant camel, with a neck almost like that of a giraffe. Camels--including llamas--developed in North America. Their evolutionary history certainly stretched through a period of two or three million--perhaps four or five million--years on this continent, reaching back to a little Eocene ancestor no bigger than a jack-rabbit. Yet after living and developing in the land through these untold ages, over a period inconceivably long to our apprehension, the camels completely died out on this continent of their birth, although not until they had sent branches to Asia and South America, where their descendants still survive.

Two other grass-eating beasts, of large size--although smaller than the above--were also plentiful. One, a bison, bigger, straighter-horned and less specialized than our modern bison, represented the cattle, which were among the animals that passed to America over the Alaskan land bridge in Pleistocene time.

The other was a big, coarse-headed horse, much larger than any modern wild horse, and kin to the then existing giant horse of Texas, which was the size of a percheron. The horses, like the camels, had gone through their developmental history on this continent, the earliest ancestor, the little four-toed "dawn horse" of the Eocene, being likewise the size of a jack-rabbit. Through millions of years, while myriads of generations followed one another, the two families developed side by side, increasing in size and seemingly in adaptation to the environment. Each stock branched into many different species and genera. They spread into the Old World and into South America. Then, suddenly,--that is, suddenly in zoologic sense--both completely died out in their ancient home, and the horses in South America also, whereas half a dozen very distinct species are still found in Asia and Africa.

All these great creatures wandered in herds to and fro across the grassy Californian plains and among the reaches of open forest. Preying upon them were certain carnivores grimmer and more terrible than any now existing. The most distinctive and seemingly the most plentiful was the sabretooth. This was a huge, squat, short-tailed, heavily built cat with upper canines which had developed to an almost walrus-like length; only, instead of being round and blunt like walrus tusks, they were sharp, with a thin, cutting edge, so that they really were entitled to be called sabres or daggers. Whether the creature was colored like a lion or like a tiger or like neither, we do not know, for it had no connection with either save its remote kinship with all the cats. The sabretooth cats, like the true cats, had gone through an immensely long period of developmental history in North America, although they did not appear here as early as the little camels and horses. Far back across the ages, at or just after the close of the Eocene--the "dawn age" of mammalian life--certain moderate-sized or small cat-like creatures existed on this continent, doubtless ancestral to the sabretooth, but so generalized in type that they display close affinities with the true cats, and even on certain points with the primitive dog creatures of the time. Age followed age--Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene. The continents rose and sank and were connected and disconnected. Vast lakes appeared and disappeared. Mountain chains wore down and other mountain chains were thrust upward. Periods of heat, during which rich forests flourished north of the arctic circle, were followed by periods of cold, when the glacial ice-cap crept down half-way across the present temperate zone. Slowly, slowly, while the surface of the world thus changed, and through innumerable reaches of time, the sabretooth cats and true cats developed along many different lines in both the Old World and the New. One form of sabretooth was in Europe with the bestial near-human things who were the immediate predecessors of the first low but entirely human savages. It was in the two Americas, however, that the sabretooth line culminated, immediately before its final extinction, in its largest and most formidable forms. This California sabretooth was not taller than a big cougar or leopard, but was probably as heavy as a fair-sized lion. Its skeletal build is such that it cannot have been an agile creature, apt at the pursuit of light and swift prey. By rugged strength and by the development of its terrible stabbing and cutting dagger teeth, that is, by sheer fighting ability, it was fitted for attack upon and battle with the massive herbivores then so plentiful. It must indeed have been a fearsome beast in close grapple. Doubtless with its sharp, retractile claws it hung onto the huge bodies of elephant, camel, and ground-sloth, of horse and bison, while the sabres were driven again and again into the mortal parts of the prey and slashed the flesh as they withdrew. It seems possible that the mouth was opened wide and stabbing blows delivered, almost as a rattlesnake strikes with raised fangs. Vast numbers of sabretooth skeletons have been found in the asphalt; evidently the strange, formidable creature haunted any region which held attraction for the various kinds of heavy game on which it preyed.

The only other carnivore as abundant as the sabretooth was a giant wolf. This was heavier than any existing wolf, with head and teeth still larger in proportion. The legs were comparatively light. Evidently, like the sabretooth, this giant wolf had become specialized as a beast of battle, fitted to attack and master the bulky browsers and grazers, but not to overtake those that were smaller and swifter. The massive jaws and teeth could smash heavy bones and tear the toughest hide; and a hungry pack of these monsters, able to assail in open fight any quarry no matter how fierce or powerful, must have spread dire havoc and dismay among all things that could not escape by flight.

There were two still larger predatory species, which were much less plentiful than either the wolf or the sabretooth. One was a short-faced cave-bear, far larger than even the huge Alaskan bear of to-day. Doubtless it took toll of the herds; but bears are omnivorous beasts, and not purely predatory in the sense that is true of those finished killers, the wolves and big cats. Unlike the wolves and cats, bears were geologically recent immigrants to America.

The other was a true cat, a mighty beast; bigger than the African lion of to-day; indeed, perhaps the biggest and most powerful lion-like or tiger-like cat that ever existed. Seemingly it was much rarer than the sabretooth; but it is possible that this seeming rarity was due to its not lurking in the neighborhood of pools and licks but travelling more freely over the wastes, being of a build fit not only for combat but for an active and wandering life. It is usually spoken of as kin to the African lion, a decidedly smaller beast. It is possible that its real kinship lies with the tiger. The Manchurian form of the tiger is an enormous beast, and a careful comparison of the skulls and skeletons may show that it equals in size the huge western American cat of Pleistocene times. I have already spoken of the fact that in many cases it is almost impossible to distinguish the lion and tiger apart by the bones alone; and it may be that the exact affinities of these recently extinct species with living forms cannot be definitely determined. But during historic and prehistoric times the lion has been a beast of western Eurasia and of Africa. The tiger, on the contrary, is and has been a beast of eastern Asia, and apparently has been spreading westward and perhaps southward--that it was not as ancient an inhabitant of jungle-covered southern India as the elephant and leopard seems probable from the fact that it is not found in Ceylon, which island in all likelihood preserves most of the southern Indian fauna that existed prior to its separation from the mainland. Moreover, the finest form of tiger exists in cold northeastern Asia. In Pleistocene times this portion of Asia was connected by a broad land bridge with western America, where the mighty American cat then roved and preyed on the herds of huge plant-eating beasts. We know that many Asiatic beasts crossed over this land bridge--the bears, bison, mountain-sheep, moose, caribou, and wapiti, which still live both in Asia and North America, and the mammoth and cave-bears, which have died out on both continents. It is at least possible--further investigation may or may not show it to be more than possible--that the huge Pleistocene cat of western America was the collateral ancestor of the Manchurian tiger. Whether it was another immigrant from Asia, or a developed form of some big American Pliocene cat, cannot with our present knowledge be determined.

Surely the thought of this vast and teeming, and utterly vanished wild life, must strongly appeal to every man of knowledge and love of nature, who is gifted with the imaginative power to visualize the past and to feel the keen delight known only to those who care intensely both for thought and for action, both for the rich experience acquired by toil and adventure, and for the rich experience obtained through books recording the studies of others.

Doubtless such capacity of imaginative appreciation is of no practical help to the hunter of big game to-day, any more than the power to visualize the long-vanished past in history helps a practical politician to do his ordinary work in the present workaday world. The governor of Gibraltar or of Aden, who cares merely to do his own intensely practical work, need know nothing whatever about any history more ancient than that of the last generation. But this is not true of the traveller. It is not even true of the politician who wishes to get full enjoyment out of life without shirking its duties. He certainly must not become a mere dreamer, or believe that his dreams will help him in practical action. But joy, just for joy's sake, has its place too, and need in no way interfere with work; and, of course, this is as true of the joy of the mind as of the joy of the body. As a man steams into the Mediterranean between the African coast and the "purple, painted headlands" of Spain, it is well for him if he can bring before his vision the galleys of the Greek and Carthaginian mercantile adventurers, and of the conquering Romans; the boats of the wolf-hearted Arabs; the long "snakes" of the Norse pirates, Odin's darlings; the stately and gorgeous war craft of Don John, the square-sailed ships of the fighting Dutch admirals, and the lofty three-deckers of Nelson, the greatest of all the masters of the sea. Aden is like a furnace between the hot sea and the hot sand; but at the sight of the old rock cisterns, carved by forgotten hands, one realizes why on that coast of barren desolation every maritime people in turn, from the mists that shroud an immemorial antiquity to our own day of fevered materialistic civilization, has seized Aden Bay--Egyptian, Sabean, Byzantine, Turk, Persian, Portuguese, Englishman; and always, a few miles distant, in the thirsty sands, the changeless desert folk have waited until pride spent itself and failed, and the new power passed, as each old power had passed, and then the merciless men of the waste once more claimed their own.

Gibraltar and Aden cannot mean to the unimaginative what they mean to the men of vision, to the men stirred by the hero tales of the past, by the dim records of half-forgotten peoples. These men may or may not do their work as well as others, but their gifts count in the joy of living. Enjoyment the same in kind comes to the man who can clothe with flesh the dry bones of bygone ages, and can see before his eyes the great beasts, hunters and hunted, the beasts so long dead, which thronged the Californian land at a time when in all its physical features it had already become essentially what it still continues to be.

The beast life of this prehistoric California must be called ancient by a standard which would adjudge the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian palace mounds and the Maya forest temples to be modern. Yet when expressed in geologic terms it was but of yesterday. When it flourished the Eurasian hunting savages were in substantially the same stage of progress as the African hunting savages who now live surrounded by a similar fauna. On the whole, taking into account the number, variety, and size of the great beasts, the fauna which surrounded Palæolithic man in Europe was inferior to that amid which dwell the black-skinned savages of equatorial Africa. Even Africa, however, although unmatched in its wealth of antelopes, cannot quite parallel, with its lion, elephant, and zebras, the lordlier elephant, the great horse, and the huge cat of the earlier Californian fauna; and the giraffe, the hyena, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus do not quite offset the sabretooth, the giant wolf, the mastodon, the various species of enormous ground-sloths, and the huge camel; the bison and buffalo about balance each other.

There were no human eyes to see nor human ears to hear what went on in southern California when it held an animal life as fierce and strange and formidable as mid-Africa to-day. The towering imperial elephants and the burly mastodons trumpeted their approach one to the other. The great camels, striding noiselessly on their padded feet, passed the clumsy ground-sloths on their way to water. The herds of huge horses and bison drank together in pools where the edges were trodden into mire by innumerable hoofs. All these creatures grew alertly on guard when the shadows lengthened and the long-drawn baying of the wolf pack heralded the night of slaughter and of fear; and the dusk thrilled with the ominous questing yawns of sabretooth and giant tiger, as the beasts of havoc prowled abroad from their day lairs among the manzanitas, or under cypress and live-oak.

The tar-pools caught birds as well as beasts. Most of these birds were modern--vultures, eagles, geese, herons. But there were condor-like birds twice the size of any living condor, the biggest birds, so far as we know, that ever flew. There were also, instead of wild turkeys, great quantities of wild peacocks--at least they have been identified as peacocks or similar big, pheasant-like birds. If the identification is correct, this is an unexpected discovery and a fresh proof of how this extinct American fauna at so many points resembled that of Asia. It was natural that a collateral ancestor of the present Asiatic pheasant-like birds should dwell beside a collateral ancestor of the present Asiatic tiger.[1]

Moreover, the tar-pools hold human bones. These, however, are probably of much later date than the magnificent fauna above described, perhaps only a few thousand years old. They belong to a rather advanced type of man. It is probable that before man came to America at all, the earlier types had died out in Eurasia, or had been absorbed and developed, or else had been thrust southward into Africa, Tasmania, Australia, and remote forest tracts of Indo-Malaysia, where, being such backward savages, they never developed anything remotely resembling a civilization. It was probably people kin to some of the later cave-dwellers who furnished the first (and perhaps until the advent of the white man the only important) immigration to America. These immigrants, the ancestors of all the tribes of Indians, spread from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Over most of the territory in both Americas they remained at the hunting stage of savage life, although they generally supplemented their hunting by a certain amount of cultivation of the soil, and although in places they developed into advanced and very peculiar culture communities.

When these savages reached North America it is likely, from our present knowledge, that the terrible and magnificent Pleistocene fauna had vanished, although in places the last survivors of the mastodon, and perhaps of one or two other forms, may still have lingered. What were the causes of this wide-spread, and complete, and--geologically speaking--sudden extermination of so many and so varied types of great herbivorous creatures, we cannot say. It may be we can never do more than guess at them. It is certainly an extraordinary thing that complete destruction should have suddenly fallen on all, literally all, of the species. Camels and horses, after they had dwelt on this continent for millions of years, since almost the dawn of mammalian life, developing from little beasts the size of woodchucks into the largest and most stately creatures of their kind that ever trod the earth's surface, all at once disappeared to the very last individual. Ground-sloths and elephants vanished likewise. The bigger forms of bison also died out, although one species remained. Many causes of extinction have been suggested. Perhaps all of them were more or less operative. Perhaps others of which we know nothing were operative. We cannot say.

But as regards certain of the formidable, but heavy rather than active, beasts of prey it is possible to hazard a guess. Compared to agile destroyers like the cougar and the timber-wolf, the sabretooth and the big-headed, small-legged giant wolf were strong, heavy, rather clumsy creatures. Predatory animals of their kind were beasts of battle rather than beasts of the chase. They were fitted to overcome by downright fighting strength a big, slow, self-confident quarry, rather than to run down a swift and timid quarry by speed or creep up to a wary and timid quarry by sinuous stealth. So long as the heavy herbivores were the most numerous these fighting carnivores were dominant over their sly, swift, slinking brethren. But when the great mass of plant-eaters grew to trust to speed and vigilance for their safety there was no longer room for preying beasts of mere prowess.

In South America it is probable that the heavy fauna died out much later than in North America and northern Eurasia; that is, it died out much later than in what zoogeographers call the holarctic realm. During most of the Tertiary period or age of mammals, the period intervening between the close of the age of great reptiles and the time when man in human form appeared on the planet, South America was an island, and its faunal history was as distinct and peculiar as that of Australia. Aside from marsupials and New World monkeys, its most characteristic animals were edentates and very queer ungulates with no resemblance to those of any other continent. Toward the close of the Tertiary land bridges connected the two Americas, and an interchange of faunas followed. The South American fauna was immensely enriched by the incoming of elephants, horses, sabretooth cats, true cats, camels, bears, tapirs, peccaries, deer, and dogs, all of which developed along new and individual lines. A few of these species, llamas and tapirs for instance, still persist in South America although they have died out in the land from which they came. But in the end, and also for unknown causes, this great fauna died out in South America likewise, leaving a continent faunistically even more impoverished than North America. The great autochthonous forms shared the extinction of the big creatures of the immigrant fauna; for under stress of competition with the newcomers, the ancient ungulates and edentates had developed giants of their own.

Recent discoveries have shown that the extinction was not complete when the ancestors of the Indians of to-day reached the southern Andes and the Argentine plains. An age previously the forefathers of these newcomers had lived in a land with the wild horse, the wild elephant, and the lion; and now, at the opposite end of the world, they had themselves reached such a land. The elephants were mastodons of peculiar type; the horses were of several kinds, some resembling modern horses, others differing from them in leg and skull formation more than any of the existing species of ass, horse, or zebra differ from one another; the huge cats probably resembled some other big modern feline more than they did the lion. Associated with them were many great beasts, whose like does not now exist on earth. The sabretooth was there, as formidable as his brother of the north, and, like this brother, bigger and more specialized than any of his Old World kin, which were probably already extinct. Among the ungulates of native origin was the long-necked, high-standing macrauchenia, shaped something like a huge, humpless camel or giraffe, and with a short proboscis. This animal doubtless browsed among the trees. Another native ungulate, the toxodon, as big and heavily made as a rhinoceros, was probably amphibious, and had teeth superficially resembling those of a rodent. The edentates not only included various ground-sloths, among them the megatherium, which was the size of an elephant, and the somewhat smaller mylodon, but also creatures as fantastic as those of a nightmare. These were the glyptodons, which were bulkier than oxen and were clad in defensive plate-armor more complete than that of an armadillo; in one species the long, armored tail terminated in a huge spiked knob, like that of some forms of mediæval mace.

The glyptodons doubtless trusted for protection to their mailed coats. The ground-sloths had no armor. Like the terrestrial ant-bear of Brazil they walked slowly on the outer edges of their fore feet, which were armed with long and powerful digging claws. They could neither flee nor hide; and it seems a marvel that they could have held their own in the land against the big cats and sabretooth. Yet they persisted for ages, and spread northward from South America. It is hard to account for this. But it is just as hard to account for certain phenomena that are occurring before our very eyes. While journeying through the interior of Brazil I not infrequently came across the big tamandua, the ant-bear or ant-eater. We found it not only in the forests but out on the marshes and prairies. It is almost as big as a small black bear. In its native haunts it is very conspicuous, both because of its size and its coloration, and as it never attempts to hide it is always easily seen. It is so slow that a man can run it down on foot. It has no teeth, and its long, curved snout gives its small head an almost bird-like look. Its fore paws, armed with long, digging claws, are turned in, and it walks on their sides. It is long-haired and thick-hided, colored black and white, and with a long, bushy tail held aloft; and as it retreats at a wabbly canter, its brush shaking above its back, it looks anything but formidable. Yet it is a gallant fighter, and can inflict severe wounds with its claws, as well as hugging with its powerful fore legs; and if menaced it will itself fearlessly assail man or dog. When chased by hounds, in the open, I have seen one instantly throw itself on its back, in which position it was much more dangerous to the hounds than they were to it. Doubtless if attacked by a jaguar--and we killed jaguars in the immediate neighborhood--it would, if given a moment's warning, have defended itself in the same fashion. I suppose that this defense would be successful; for otherwise it seems incredible that such a conspicuous, slow-moving beast can exist at all in exactly the places where jaguars, able to kill a cow or horse, are plentiful. But, even so, it is difficult to understand how it has been able to persist for ages in company with the great spotted cat, the tyrant of the Brazilian wilderness. At any rate, with this example before us, we need not wonder overmuch at the ability of megatherium and mylodon to hold their own in the presence of the sabretooth.

In the late fall of 1913, as previously described, I motored north from the beautiful Andean lake, Nahuel Huapi, through the stony Patagonian plains to the Rio Negro. The only wild things of any size that we saw were the rheas, or South American ostriches, and a couple of guanacos, or wild llamas, small, swift, humpless camels, of which the ancestral forms were abundant in the North American Miocene. But one of my companions, the distinguished Argentine explorer, educator, and man of science, Francisco Moreno, had some years previously made a discovery which showed that not many thousand years back, when the Indians had already come into the land, the huge and varied fauna of the Pleistocene still lingered at the foot of the Andes. He had found a cave in which savage men had dwelt; and in the cave were the remains of the animals which they had killed, or which had entered the cave at times when its human tenants were absent. Besides the weapons and utensils of the savages, he had found the grass which they had used for beds, and enclosures walled with stones for purposes of which he could not be sure. It will be remembered that in the cave-home of the 'Ndorobo which Kermit found there were beds of grass, and enclosures walled with brush, in which their dogs were kept. Whether these early Patagonian Indians had dogs I do not know; but many African tribes build low stone walls as foundations for sheds used for different purposes; and sometimes, among savages, it is absolutely impossible to guess the use to which a given structure is put unless it is actually seen in use--exactly as sometimes it is wholly impossible to divine what a particular specimen of savage pictorial art indicates unless the savage is there to explain it to his civilized brother.

Among the signs of human occupation Doctor Moreno found, well preserved in the cold cave, not only the almost fresh bones, but even pieces of the skin, of certain extinct animals. Among the species whose bones were found were the macrauchenia, tiger, horse, and mylodon. When Doctor Moreno said tiger, I asked if he did not mean jaguar; but he said no, that he meant a huge cat like an Old World lion or tiger; I do not know with what modern feline its affinities were closest. The discovery of the comparatively fresh remains of the horse gave rise in some quarters to the belief that it was possible this species of horse survived to the day the Spaniards came to the Argentine and was partly ancestral to the modern Argentine horse; but the supposition is untenable, for the horse in question represents a very archaic and peculiar type, with specialized legs and an extraordinary skull, and could not possibly have had anything to do with the production of the wild, or rather feral, horses of the pampas and the Patagonian plains. Of the mylodon Doctor Moreno found not only comparatively fresh bones, with bits of sinew, but dried dung--almost as large as that of an elephant--and some big pieces of skin. The skin was clothed with long, coarse hair, and small ossicles were set into it, making minute bony plates. Doctor Moreno gave me a fragment of the skin, and also bones and dung; they are now in the American Museum of Natural History. The discovery gave rise to much fanciful conjecture; it was even said that the mylodon had been domesticated and kept tame in the caves; but Doctor Moreno laughed at the supposition and said that it lacked any foundation in fact. He also said that, contrary to what has sometimes been asserted, the age of the remains must be estimated in thousands, possibly ten thousands, and certainly not hundreds, of years.

There is no need of fanciful guesswork in order to enhance the startling character of the discovery. It seems to show beyond question that the early hunting savages of southernmost South America lived among the representatives of a huge fauna, now wholly extinct, just as was true of the earlier, and far more primitive, hunting savages of Europe.

Save in tropical Africa and in portions of hither and farther India this giant fauna has now everywhere died out. In most regions, and in the earlier stages, man had little or nothing to do with its destruction. But during the last few thousand years he has been the chief factor in the extermination of the great creatures wherever he has established an industrial or agricultural civilization or semicivilization. The big cat he has warred against in self-defense. The elephant in India has been kept tame or half tame. The Old World horse has been tamed and transplanted to every portion of the temperate zones, and to the dry or treeless portions of the torrid zone.

Around the Mediterranean, the cradle of the ancient culture of our race, we have historic record of the process. Over three thousand years ago the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings hunted the elephant in Syria. A thousand years later the elephant was a beast of war in the armies of the Greeks, the Carthaginians, and the Romans. Twenty-five hundred years ago the lion was a dreaded beast of ravin in the Balkan Peninsula and Palestine, as he was a hundred years ago in North Africa; now he is to be found south of the Atlas, or, nearing extinction, east of the Euphrates. Seemingly the horse was tamed long after the more homely beasts, the cattle, swine, goats, and sheep. He was not a beast for peaceful uses; he was the war-horse, whose neck was clothed with thunder, who pawed the earth when he heard the shouting of the captains. At first he was used not for riding, but to draw the war chariots. Rameses and the Hittites decided their great battles by chariot charges; the mighty and cruel Assyrian kings rode to war and hunting in chariots; the Homeric Greeks fought in chariots; Sisera ruled the land with his chariots of iron; and long after they had been abandoned elsewhere war chariots were used by the champions of Erin. Cavalry did not begin to supersede them until less than a thousand years before our era; and from that time until gunpowder marked the beginning of the modern era the horse decided half the great battles of history.

But with this process primitive man had nothing to do. He was and, in the few remote spots where he still exists unchanged, he is wholly unable even to conceive of systematic war against the lion, or of trying to tame the horse or elephant. These three, alone among the big beasts of the giant fauna in which the age of mammals had culminated, once throve in vast numbers from the Cape of Good Hope and the valley of the Nile northward to the Rhone and the Danube, eastward across India and Siberia, and from Hudson Bay to the Straits of Magellan. They were dominant figures in the life of all the five continents when primitive man had struggled upward from the plane of his ape-like ancestors and had become clearly human. For ages he was too feeble to be as much of a factor in their lives as they were in the lives of one another; and in North America he never became such a factor. The great man-killing cat was his dreaded enemy, to be fought only under the strain of direst need. The horse became a favorite prey when he grew cunning enough to devise snares and weapons. The elephant he feared and respected for its power and occasional truculence, and endeavored to destroy on the infrequent occasions when chance gave an opening to his own crafty ferocity.

All this is true, at the present day, in portions of mid-Africa. I have been with tribes whom only fear or imminent starvation could drive to attack the lion; and I have seen the naked warriors of the Nandi kill the great, maned manslayer with their spears. Again and again, as an offering of peace and good-will, I have shot zebras for natives who greedily longed for its flesh. My son and I killed a rogue elephant bull at the earnest petition of a small Uganda tribe whose crops he had destroyed, whose field watchers he had killed, and whose village he menaced with destruction.

Of all the wonderful great beasts with which primitive man in his most primitive forms has been associated, the three with which on the whole this association was most wide-spread in time and space, were the horse, the lion, and the elephant.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Professor J. C. Merriam, of the University of California, first studied this fauna. The excavations are now being carried on by Director Frank S. Daggett, of the capital Museum of Los Angeles County. I have spoken above of the vast herds of game encountered over a century ago by Lewis and Clark on the upper Missouri. The journals of these two explorers form an American classic, and they have found a worthy editor in Reuben Gold Thwaites; there could not be an edition more satisfactory from every standpoint--including that of good taste. In anthropology I follow the views of Fairfield Osborne and Ales Hrdlicka; I am not competent to decide as to the points where they differ; and they would be the first to say that some of the hypotheses they advance must be accepted as provisional until our knowledge is greater.]