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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL

Upper Dease and the portage route from Dismal Lake to Imaernirk I have made a survey.

I have obtained specimens of what I think is rich iron ore from Victoria Land north of Cape Bexley. Copper is picked up almost anywhere by the natives in the whole Coronation Gulf district, each family having its favorite place to search for material for knives and arrows. The spot most in repute however is a short distance north of Dismal Lake. I have several of these copper specimens.

After spending several months on the lower Horton River and a like period on the Coppermine, I am of the opinion that Horton River is fully as large a stream. Mr. Stefánsson made a compass survey in December, 1910, of Horton River from the point nearest Langton Bay to within seventy miles of Bear Lake, taking also a collection of rock specimens.]

The expedition's opportunities for ethnological study in this region are thought to be better now than they are likely ever to be again; the expedition is well placed in regard to outfit and food supplies, while sophistication and changes in the material life of the Eskimo will progress rapidly, due to the trade relations which have been opened with the Bear Lake Indians during this summer of 1911. To the regret of Mr. Stefánsson, the expedition itself has helped to hasten the end of the isolation of the Eskimo. They came to trust him, a white man, also his Eskimo from the West, and learned from these Eskimo that Indians are a harmless people nowadays and besides have an abundance of iron and other articles valuable to possess. Therefore it is the desire of the expedition, notwithstanding the homesickness of the men, to remain in the field still another year because of their great opportunities for work.

White fox in trap; photograph taken at a distance of six feet.

A white fox skin is worth about six dollars in the Arctics and seventy-five skins, the equivalent of four hundred and fifty dollars, is a large number to be taken in one year. The present shortage on the market in Russian white fox will cause rapid destruction of the species in Arctic America

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A NEW RESTORATION OF A TITANOTHERE

By William K. Gregory

NE of the chief objects of the American Museum's department of vertebrate palæontology is to let the public discover that fossils are not necessarily dry and unprofitable, but on the contrary full of interest and meaning. Every legitimate resource of science and art is employed to clothe, as it were, the dry bones with flesh-to picture the jolly ichthyosaur disporting once more in the waves, or the tyrannosaur harassing his sluggish foe.

Mr. Erwin S. Christman has recently made some very effective restorations, especially those of the primitive "elephants," Maritherium and Palæomastodon. Under the

Titanothere skull and model of full-size head in process of preparation. The skull is first copied exactly in a clay model. Additional clay to represent the flesh is then added to the outside of the skull model. The photograph shows the right half of the model completed and the left half still revealing the clay skull which makes the foundation

The mouth as represented here is probably too large. the first grinding tooth

MODELING A TITANOTHERE

The angle of the mouth in herbivorous animals does not extend usually behind

Mr. Erwin S. Christman, who has made for the Horse Alcove a series of models of living horses in full action, is now at work on a series of full size heads to show the evolution of the titanotheres, extinct distant relatives of the rhinoceroses

A NEW RESTORATION OF A TITANOTHERE

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known evolutionary history in the first half of the Age of Mammals. The last and greatest member of the titanotheres is the flat-horned Brontotherium platyceras, and a brief review of our reasons for representing this animal as it here appears may serve to illustrate one or two principles in the art of restoring extinct animals. The skull was first modeled in clay from a wellpreserved fossil specimen. The clay to represent the flesh was then laid in on one side of the skull model, the other side being left exposed temporarily to show the supposed relations between skull contour and external form.

The top and sides of the head offered no especial difficulty, since the location of the principal muscle-masses of the temporal region and jaws could be inferred by comparison with the corresponding parts in the skulls of recent rhinoceroses and other distant relatives of the brontothere. The flattened "horns" (bony outgrowths from the skull) for various reasons were represented as covered with very tough hide rather than with true horn. The nose and nostrils were restored after careful comparison with many animals, especially the "black" rhinoceros, whose bony nasal region is essentially similar to that of the brontothere.

The most difficult part is the mouth and here present-day animals offer some at first rather contradictory evidence. In both the "black" and the "white" rhinoceroses of Africa the front teeth of the upper and lower jaws are lacking in the adult and the corresponding bony parts are reduced. From this similarity we might be led to expect that the lips of the two were also similar. And yet, as a matter of fact, the black" rhinoceros in adaptation to its habits of plucking up roots and shrubs, has a pointed or prehensile upper lip; while in the "white" rhino, which feeds exclusively upon grass, the upper lip is very broad and square. The Asiatic rhinoceros, which feeds in the "grass jungles," has large cutting upper incisors and divergent lower tusks; its upper lip is pointed, but less than in the "black" species. These examples indicate that at least in the rhinoceroses the shape of the upper lip depends less upon the form and arrangement of the front teeth than upon the nature of the food and the mode of tearing it up from the ground.

The grinding teeth of the brontothere seem to be fitted to crush and cut up vegetation of a somewhat coarser nature than the tender shrubs and roots which form the principal food of the "black" rhino. Still less was the brontothere a true grazer, for in comparison with the "white" rhino, its grinders had low crowns and lacked the "cement" which is so characteristic of the teeth of grass-loving ungulates. Also its front teeth were feeble, their prehensile function being very possibly usurped by a heavy upper lip. Hence it seems probable that the brontothere fed on coarse shrubs and roots and had a heavy, prehensile upper lip; accordingly it is this type of lip which Mr. Christman has given to his model.

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DR. JOEL ASAPH ALLEN: AN APPRECIATION

HE JOURNAL congratulates itself on the privilege of publishing as its frontispiece the portrait of Dr. Joel Asaph Allen, dean in seniority and accomplishment of the American Museum's scientific staff. While the past quarter of a century has swept by with its political problems and its economic struggles, one man has sat at his desk in the American Museum content to do the work that crowded before him. To-day this man is one of the country's great men of science with but few who can equal him in achievement.

Dr. Allen came to the American Museum in 1885 from the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Cambridge where he had been assistant in ornithology and mammalogy and for many years a student under Agassiz, having been fortunate enough to accompany Agassiz on the Thayer expedition to Brazil and the Amazon. He is one of the men to whom has passed the spirit of devotion for natural history that Agassiz felt and the inspiration Agassiz gained in early comradeship with Carl Schimper and others and later from Oken and Cuvier.

Dr. Allen on leaving Cambridge was already, a scientist of renown, but it is at the American Museum that he has done the bulk of his work leading the institution to honor through the high character of his researches and receiving in return unusual opportunity in this case opportunity that forced much of his investigation into the definite lines of the systematist. Zoological classification however is a far different thing to-day from what it was in the time of Linnæus or even of the great naturalists of a century ago, for the lines of descent and blood relationship can be drawn close in accordance with very extensive knowledge in comparative anatomy, histology and embryology, palæontology and geographical distribution. But the man who rises to first rank must have a master mind that can make a wide sweep of this modern horizon as well as the keen eye of the master observer and the discriminating judicial power by which to disentangle the contradictions of a multitudinous bibliography.

Dr. Allen has been one of the men to shape zoological classification and keep it in line. He has described new families and genera and many hundreds of new species and through a close study of geographical distribution in relation to species formation, has also drawn the distinctions clearer in many series of intergrading subspecies. His researches have been published under some fifteen hundred titles, some of which like his American Bisons, 1876, and History of North American Pinnipedia, 1897, are in book form and others in articles and monographs appearing in the Bulletins and Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology and of the American Museum of Natural History, and also scatteringly in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, U. S. National Museum, Boston Society of Natural History, Philadelphia Academy of Sciences and U. S.