The Fossil Mammals of North American1

Abstract

THIS important contribution to our knowledge of the extinct mammals of the United States is the joint production of Profs. W. B. Scott and H. F. Osborn, of the Geological Museum at Princeton College, to whom we are already indebted for much valuable work on the subject. The present memoir is of more than ordinary importance, since the authors have endeavoured to complete our knowledge of forms already more or less fully described, rather than to add fresh burdens to the memory by recording a host of so-called new species and genera founded upon specimens which are not sufficiently characteristic to prove their distinctness from forms already described. Indeed, they have taken the opposite course, and endeavoured to show how the number of such species and genera may be reduced; not shrinking, as the manner of some is, from relegating when necessary some of the terms proposed by themselves to the rank of synonyms. This line of work, we are assured, is the one now urgently called for, as it is almost certain that the number of names which have been already proposed must, if properly defined and correlated, really include by far the greater proportion of the animals of the better known formations.