r. He seems,
however, to have had some misgivings on the subject, and, being an
honest fellow, invited some Washington scientific men to examine it
in advance of a public exhibition. The first feature to strike the
critical observer was that the arms of the fossil were crossed over
the breast in the most approved undertaker's fashion, showing that
if the woman had ever existed, she had devoted her dying moments to
arranging a pose for the approval of posterity. Little more than a
glance was necessary to show that the fossil was simply baked clay.
Yet the limbs were hard and stiff. One of the spectators therefore
asked permission of the owner to bore with an auger into the leg and
see what was inside. A few moments' work showed that the bone of the
leg was a bar of iron, around which clay had been moulded and baked.
I must do the crestfallen owner the justice to say that his anxiety
to convince the spectators of his own good faith in the matter far
exceeded his regret at the pecuniary loss which he had suffered.

Another amusing experience that Marsh had with a would-be fossil
arose out of the discovery here and there in Connecticut of the
fossil footprints of birds. Shortly after a find of this kind had
been announced, a farmer drove his wagon up in front of the Peabody
Museum, called on the professor, and told him he had dug up something
curious on his farm, and he wished the professor would tell him what
it was. He thought it looked like the footprints of a bird in a
stone, but he was not quite sure.

Marsh went out and looked at the stone. A single glance was enough.

"Oh, I see what they are. They are the footprints of the domestic
turkey. And the oddest part of it is, they are all made with the
right foot."

The simple-minded countryman, in making the prints with the turkey's
foot, had overlooked the difference between the right and left foot,
and the consequent necessity of having the tracks which pertained
to the two feet alternate.

Washington is naturally a centre of information on all subjects
relating to the aboriginal tribes of America and to life on the plains
generally. Besides the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Ethnology
has been an active factor in this line. An official report cannot
properly illustrate life in all its aspects, and therefore should
be supplemented by the experiences of leading explorers. This is
all the more necessary if, as seems to be the case, the peculiar
cha