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FOR: THE PEOPER FOR EDVCATION FOR SCIENCE
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56. Reeds, C.A.
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6 . Osborn,H.F.
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AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
Guide Leaflets No. 52-64
1921-1926
ix
The Hall of the Age of Men e Second Edition, Revised 1923 :
The Hall of the Age of Man Third Edition, Revised and Emlerged,May 1925
The Story of Museum Groups. Nov. 1921 Plants of Wax. Februery, 1922
Basketry Designs of the Mission Indians. July, 1922
The Geology of New York City and Vicinity (Reprinted from Natural History,Vol.22, pp. 1-15, 1922)
The Geology of New York City and Vicinty. (Illustrations vary)
Guide to the Hall of Mammals, Oct, 1923 Preparation of Birds for Study. 1923
The Preparetion of Rough Skeletons.
The Story of the Yosemite Valley. July 1924 The Capture and Preservation of Small
Mammals for Study. November 1925 Mastodons and Manmoths of North America.
(Reprinted from Natural History, Vol.25,no.1, and Vol. 25, no. 1» L923, 15%)
Indian Costumes in the Unites States...
July 1926
Meteorites, Meteors and Shooting Stars. 1926
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The HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN is designed to show what we know of Man and his environment during the long period of geologic time in which man rose from a condition of limited intelligence and subordina- tion to the Animal World to his present condition of great intelligence and mastery both of the Animal World and of many of the principal forces of Nature.
The exhibit is arranged in an educational manner so as to present very simply, very truthfully, and very clearly, our actual knowledge, and not to confuse the visitor with theories or speculations.
The actual fossil remains of Man are represented by casts which are colored as nearly as possible to duplicate the originals which are to be found only in the great museums of Europe. Great pains are taken to secure casts of the very latest discoveries in various parts of the world. The beginning of this collection was a gift of Dr. J. Leon Williams in 1915, and it is constantly being amplified by gifts from other friends and from museums abroad.
The models and restorations and mural paintings of man and of the great mammals among which he lived and struggled represent the knowledge of more than a century of exploration and anatomical study by the leading students of Comparative Anatomy, Paleontology from the time of Cuvier in 1790 to the present period
NEANDERTHAL MAN Modeled by Dr. J. H. MeGregor on cast of skull found at La Chapelle aux Saints, France, in 1908.
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a sic y ie TRINIL APE-MAN NEANDERTHAL Man Cr6-MaGnon MAn Pithecanthropus erectus Homo neanderthalensis Homo sapiens
Fig. 1. THrer Great Races or Prenistoric Man. Models by Professor J. H. McGregor.
The Hall of the Age of Man in the
American Museum By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
Second Edition, reprinted, with additions and changes from Natural History, the Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, for May-June, 1920, pages 228-246.
The exhibits in the Hall of the Age of Man are intended to illustrate what is known of the origin, relationships and early history of man, as deduced from his remains and primitive implements, and also to show the animals by which he was surrounded in the early stages of his existence. These animals are shown not only as mounted skeletons but in a series of large mural paintings portraying them as they appeared in the flesh amid their natural surroundings. These paintings are the result of the study of their fossil remains and their careful comparison with related existing animals, a work to which the author has devoted many years of study. Hence they give an accurate and vivid idea of the animals that were the contemporaries of early races of man in various regions of the world.
A series of cases in the center of the hall are devoted to the story of man, and that it can be compressed into so small a space is an indication of the scarcity of his re- mains, for here are displayed reproductions of the most notable specimens that have been discovered. It has been necessary to use copies, for the actual specimens are few in number and scattered through many museums in widely separated parts of the world.
HE beginning of the Age of Man, some 500,000 years ago, roughly estimated as the close of the Age of Mammals, marks in reality but the beginning of the close of the Age of Mammals. The
extinction of the most superb mammals that the earth has ever produced, during the early stages of human evolution, progressed from natural causes due directly or indirectly to the Glacial epoch. With the intro-
3
1 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
duction of firearms the destruction has proceeded with increasing rapidity, and today it is going on, by the use of guns and steel traps, at a more rapid rate than ever. By the middle of this century man will be alone amid the ruins of the mammalian world he has destroyed, the period of the Age of Mammals will have entirely closed, and the Age of Man will have reached a numerical climax, from which some statisticians believe it will probably recede, because we are approaching the pointfof the over-population of the earth in three of the five great continents.
Man as a Primate, Case I
A few of the more striking points of anatomical agreement between men and apes are illustrated in the first A case, which shows comparative series of skulls, lower jaws, brain-casts and teeth.
In this exhibit skulls of the great man apes (at the right in Case I) are placed for comparison with those of some of the known extinct or fossil races of man, each ascending along a line of its own. Copies of the most recent discoveries in various parts of the world are placed in this series; in fact, this entire exhibit is designed to show from time to time our progress in discovery, to present actual evidence in place of theories and speculations, and to show how very limited this evidence is as compared with the abundant evidence in the ancestry, for example, of the horse (shown in the hall of the Age of Mammals).
The Ascent of Man
Man has a long line of ancestry of his own, perhaps two million or more years in length. The cradle of the human race was, in our opinion, in Asia, in regions not yet explored by paleontologists. One reason that human and prehuman fossil remains are rare is that the ancestors of man lived partly among the trees and forests; this does not mean that they were arboreal; they lived chiefly on the ground.!. Even when living in a more open country the ancestors of man were alert to escape the floods and sandstorms which entombed animals like the horse of the open country and of the plains. Hence fossil remains of man as well as of his ancestors are extremely rare until the period of burial began.
The earliest known human remains of the Trinil, Piltdown and Heidelberg races consist principally of portions of skulls, of jaws, and teeth. Individuals of the prehistoric races of Europe are now represented by casts in the Hall of the Age of Man. The museum series
['This refers only to the higher, more recent ancestors of man. The most thorough studies of the anatomy of the foot of man and other primates have brought strong support to the view that the human foot has been derived from an earlier ape-like stage in which the great toe could be used in climbing. W. K. G.]
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Fig. 2. A, B, C, D, skull fragments found by Dawson and Smith Woodward in 1911, 1912. #, jaw fragment found by Dawson in 1912. F, canine tooth found by Father Teil- hard de Chardin in 1913. G, nasal bones found by Dawson in 19138. H, single worked flint found near original skull fragments by Smith Woodward. Jaw one-third natural size; other fragments a bit larger than one-third (distorted somewhat by camera).
Fig 3. A, side and top views of jaw of first Piltdown man, with first and second lower molar teeth in place. B, side and top views of first lower molar tooth of second Piltdown man. About three-fourths natural size.
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Fig. 4. The “Heidelberg jaw,’ found at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany. About one-third natural size.
Fig. 5. Sand-pit at Mauer, near Heidelberg. X marks the spot where the jaw was found, in place and beneath 79 feet of glacial and post glacial deposits.
8
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 9
began in 1915 with the gift of the J. Leon Williams Collection, and has been enriched by additions from the museums of London, Paris, and recently by the Neanderthal man of Krapina, presented by Professor Kk. Gorjanovié-Kramberger, through the kindness of Col. C. W. Furlong; also the Talgai skull from South Australia, presented by Dr. Stewart A. Smith.
The earliest known man is the Foxhall man, known at present only by his flint implements, partly burned with fire, found near the little hamlet of Foxhall, near Norwich, on the east coast of England. These flints, discovered in 1921, constitute the first proofs that man of suff- cient intelligence to make a variety of flint implements and to use fire existed in Britain at the close of the Age of Mammals; this is the first true Tertiary man ever found.
The Trinil ape-man, the Pithecanthropus of Java is the lowest of the known human or subhuman races. It is called ape-man because it is more human than ape-like. The restored head by Professor J. Howard McGregor, of Columbia University, is designed to show its half human, half anthropoid resemblance, as suggested by the top of the cranium, the only part known, which is far more human than that of any ape cranium, and at the same time far more ape-like than that of any human cranium. It is not impossible that this ape-man is related to the Neanderthal man.
The Most Ancient Human Races, Piltdown and Heidelberg
A few deep brown fragments of a skull and jaw and one tooth repre- sent all the remains known of the Piltdown man, discovered in England by Charles Dawson in 1912. Several reconstructions of the Piltdown skull have been made, including the original by Professor A. Smith Woodward in London, in the British Museum, another, in this country, by Professor McGregor. The problem whether the Piltdown jaw belongs to this human skull or whether it belongs to a fossil chimpanzee is now actually settled, because a second specimen of the Piltdown man has been found two miles from the first in the same Piltdown gravels; this specimen has the same kind of lower grinding teeth and the same form in the bone of the forehead. The skull itself is of. a primitive human type, the brain cast showing a lowly development of the higher cerebral association centers (Elliot Smith 1922).
Unquestionably the next most ancient human relic which has thus far been discovered is the jaw of the so-called Heidelberg man, a fossil which may be 250,000 years old. It is notable for its great size and for its lack of a protruding bony chin. The Heidelberg man may be ancestral to the Neanderthal man.
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12 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
The Neanderthal Race
The Neanderthal man represents the oldest fossil human race of which the skeleton is fully known. The remains are very abundant, and the American Museum owns reproductions of many skulls and parts of skulls found during the last half century in Spain, Germany, France, and Hungary. Foremost of these is the skulleap found near Diisseldorf, Germany, in 1856, which constitutes the type of the Neanderthal race itself.
Of great interest is the reconstruction by Professor McGregor of a Neanderthal female head, based upon a skull found at Gibraltar in 1848, which gives us the head characters of the women of this very primitive race.
Nearly perfect is the skull from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, originally restored by Professor Marcellin Boule, of Paris, and reconstructed by Professor McGregor; this distinguished American expert in the anatomy of palzeolithic man is now engaged upon the reconstruction of the entire skeleton and body of the Neanderthal man. This life-sized Neanderthal model will be one of themost interesting exhibits in the American Museum; it represents many years of laborious study and research by Professor McGregor, who was sent by the Museum on a special tour through Europe to examine all the known fossil remains of the Neanderthal race, representing forty or fifty individuals altogether, including the last specimen to be found, that of La Ferrassie, France, which is now being described by Dr. Boule.
The Rodesian Race
The most recent discovery is the Rhodesian man, Homo rhodesiensis, made in 1921, in a cave at the Broken Hill Mine, northern Rhodesia, Africa, where the human remains were found in association both with stone and bone implements, and with broken bones of animals which had evidently been used as food. This man was in the Stone Age of industry, using scrapers and knives of quartz and quartzite. The forehead is very low and the ridges above the orbit are excessively prominent; the opening for the nose was very wide, but the palate and teeth are like those in existing races. The brain is of a very low human type of the capacity of 1,280 ¢.c. (see Smith Woodward’s Guide, pp. 29-31).
The Neanderthal Flint Workers (Mural I) The mural of the Neanderthal group of flint workers shows in the distance, along the Dordogne River, herds of woolly rhinoceroses. The center of interest is the flint industry, which, with the chase, occu-
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HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 15
pied the entire energy of the Neanderthals. Since the Neanderthal type is totally different from any modern human type, it must be studied from models of its own. The group is very carefully arranged to show the physical characters of this man: the knees slightly bent in the peculiar standing posture, the broad, heavy shoulders, slightly stooped, and the massive neck and the head set well forward. In the back- ground is the famous cavern of Le Moustier, which gives its name to the Mousterian period of flint industry pursued by the Neanderthals.
The Cré-Magnon Race of High Type
The highly evolved Cr6-Magnon race entered Europe from the east and drove out the Neanderthals. The Cré-Magnons were people like ourselves in point of evolution, and the characters of the head and cranium reflect their moral and spiritual potentiality. This was a race of warriors, of hunters, of painters and sculptors far superior to any of their predecessors. The contrast between the Cré-Magnon head and those of the Neanderthals which precede them is as wide as it possibly could be. It is intellectual and thoughtful.
Cro-Magnon Artists Painting the Mammoth (Mural IT)
One of the recent murals in the hall of the Age of Man (over the door- way opposite the Cré-Magnon exhibit) represents four of the Cré- Magnon artists actually painting the great fresco in the cave of Font-de- Gaume, Dordogne, France. The writer has been studying the composi- tion of this group for years, with Mr. Charles R. Knight, artist, aided by advice of the Abbé Henri Breuil of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris, as well as of Mr. N. C. Nelson, archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History.
There are six figures in the group; four are depicted partly nude to show their anatomy in contrast with that of the Neanderthals. The two half-kneeling figures are holding up small lamps to illuminate the smooth surface of the limestone wall on which the procession of mammoths is being depicted. The half-erect figure represents an artist with pointed flint incising the outlines of a mammoth on the wall. The fully erect central figure represents an artist laying on the colors. A kneeling figure is preparing the colors on a rock. This design enables the painter to show the tall, slender proportions of the men of this Cr6-Magnon race. The standing figure to the left is that of a chieftain clothed in well-made fur garments, who carries on top of his staff his baton de commandement as the insignia of his rank. The only illumination is that of the flicker- ing wicks in the small oil lamps.
16 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
Men of the New Stone Age
Men of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, continued to used chipped stone implements, but unlike their predecessors, they often polished them. They were the direct forerunners of civilization. They cultivated the ground, raising cereals, and had domesticated cattle and other animals; they made pottery and wove textiles; they lived in villages of huts, often built on piles near the shores of lakes. They erected sepulchres and temples of huge stones (dolmens, megaliths).
The Neolithic Stag Hunters (Mural LTS);
This mural group also is in its place in the hall (at the west end), having been completed in 1919. It represents men of the Nordic race, brown- or fair-haired, hunters of the stag, living along the southern shores of the Baltic in the earliest stage of the New Stone Age, a stage known as the Campignian from remains of huts and rudely polished stone imple- ments found near Campigny in France. The scene is on the border of one of the northern beech forests and represents the return from the hunt. After the ardor of the chase the hunters have thrown off their fur garments. The chieftain in the center is partly clad in furs; in the coming winter season he will be wholly fur clad. His son, a fair-haired youth with a necklace of bear claws, grasps a bow and arrow and holds in leash a wolf dog, ancestor of the modern sheep dog of northern France. The hunters, with spears tipped with stone heads, are resting from the chase. Two vessels of pottery indicate the introduction of the new ceramic art, accompanied by crude ornamentation.
This race was courageous, warlike, hardy, but of a lower intelligence and artistic order than the Cré-Magnons; it was chiefly concerned, in a rigorous northern climate, with the struggle for existence, in which the qualities of endurance, tribal loyalty, and the rudiments of family life were being cultivated. Rude huts take the place of caverns and shelters, which are now mostly abandoned.
These were tall men with high, narrow skulls, related to the existing Nordic race, more powerful in build than the people of the Swiss Lake Dwellings. Skulls and skeletons representative of this hardy northern type are abundantly known in Scandinavia, but have not found their way to our American Museum collections as yet.
The Great Fossil Mammals Contemporaneous with and Hunted by Man
The hall of the Age of Man contains four chief collections of the mammals of the world during the period of the Age of Man. In Europe man hunted the reindeer, the wild horses and cattle, and the mammoth. He used the hide of the reindeer for clothing, the flesh and marrow for food. He carved the bones as well as the ivory tusks of the mammoth.
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18 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
The mammoth, the northern, hairy type of elephant known to early explorers of fossil remains, was foremost among the great mammals hunted by man. The previous history of the proboscidean order is also shown in the Hall of the Age of Man.
This is one of the romances of evolution quite equal in interest to the evolution of the horse. This collection is by far the most complete in existence; it contains as much in the way of complete skeletons as those in all the other museums of the world combined. The early stages in the evolution of the proboscideans, beginning with the Palzomastodon dis- covered in the Faydim region of northern Africa, carry us back into times far antecedent to the Age of Man, namely, into an early period of the Age of Mammals, the Oligocene. Thus the visitor can see here the entire history of the evolution of the proboscideans, which taken altogether is the most majestic line of evolution that has thus far been discovered. The evolution of the proboscideans culminates in the mastodons and mammoths.
The Four Seasons in the Glacial Epoch (Murals IV-VII)
The four great murals on the north walls of the Hall of the Age of Man represent scenes during the four seasons of the year near the close of the Glacial epoch in the Northern Hemisphere.
These four seasons belong in the same period of geologic time, namely, the final glacial stage, the period of the maximum advance of the glaciers over the entire Northern Hemisphere, of the most intense cold, and of the farthest southward extension of the northern types of mammals. This is the time of the Cré-Magnon race, and our knowledge of the mammals, reindeer, and rhinoceroses is derived from the actual Cré-Magnon paintings and etchings, chiefly those found within the
caverns. The murals of the four seasons are as follows:
IV. Midwinter.—The woolly rhinoceros in northern France. V. Early Winter.—The reindeer and mammoth on the river Somme, France. VI. Midsummer.—The mastodon, royal bison, and horse on the Mis- souri River, in the latitude of Kansas. VII. Autuwmn.—The deer-moose, tapir, and giant beaver, in northern New Jersey.
Glacial Midwinter in Northern France (Mural IV) The woolly rhinoceros,: like the woolly mammoth, was heavily en- wrapped in hair, beneath which was a thick coat of fine wool. With this protection the animal was quite indifferent to the wintry blasts which
61
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‘ydvibojoyd payybriihdoy ~uUsLogso Plryuony fisua yy fo uoyra.p ayy sapun ‘qybuy “Yy sajipyg fig payuwd
20 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
swept over the steppe-like country of northern France. This golden- brown wool is actually preserved on the side of the face of one specimen discovered, which is now in the Museum of Petrograd. The head of the rhinoceros was long and narrow, like that of the white rhinoceros of Africa, but the Jaws were narrower and the upper lips were more pointed. It is an animal quite distinct from the great black rhinoceros still extant in Africa, which is a grazer with broad lips. In the distance in the painting are shown the saigas, antelopes which wandered over France at that time, and a group of woolly mammoths.
Early Winter Scene on the Somme River in Northern France (Mural V) The scene represents the two herds, reindeer and mammoth, migrating southward from the banks of the river Somme. These reindeer and mammoths are, in fact, depicted very precisely in the paintings and engravings left by the Cré-Magnon artists—especially in the cavern of Font-de-Gaume. It is a striking fact that, in the case of the mammoth, every painting, drawing, etching, and model which the Cr6-Magnon man has given us exhibits exactly the same characters: the long hairy covering, the very high hump above the forehead, the notch between the hump and the neck, the very high shoulders, the short back, the rapid slope of the back over the hind quarters, the short tail. There is no doubt that, aided by these wonderful Paleolithic designs, the artist, Mr. Knight, has given us a very close representation of the actual appearance of the woolly mammoth.
Midsummer on the Missouri (Mural IV)
The summer scene on the Missouri River (on the parallel of Kansas) represents the region south of the farthest advance of the ice sheet. The mastodons are grouped in such a manner as to show the characteristic low, flattened head, the long low back, the symmetrical fore and hind quarters, the extremely short, massive limbs, and the very broad and massive hip region as seen from behind. In the center of the picture stands the majestic Bison regius, the royal bison, known only from a skull, a superb specimen with the horn cores attached, in the collection of the American Museum. These animals were like gigantic buffalo or bison, beside which the modern buffalo would appear very diminutive. The characters of the hair and wool are not known, but it is assumed that they were similar to those of the existing buffalo, since the paintings of the bison by the Cré-Magnon artists in France all show the distinctive beard below the chin. At the right is a group of wild American horses of the period, the last of their race in this country; the species is Equus scott, the skeleton of which has been discovered in northern Texas.
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THE MASTODON This distant relative of the elephants may have been a contemporary of early man in the closing phases of the period of the glaciers, in North America.
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Painted by Charles R. Knight, under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Copyrighted photograph.
THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH
This great elephant was characteristic of the latter part of the period of the glaciers in Europe. He was unted by the Cré-Magnons.
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HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 25
Early Autumn in New Jersey (Mural VIT)
The autumn scene in northern New Jersey embraces three very distinctive North American types of the period, all of which have become extinct. The deer-moose, Cervalces (to the left), was described by Professor W. B. Scott, of Princeton, from a single skeleton found in the gravel beds of northern New Jersey, which is now preserved complete in the Princeton Museum. The American fossil tapir (in the center) is known from sparse remains, the best of which were among the earliest discoveries of the pioneers of American paleontology. The giant rodents of the genus Castoroides (see two individuals at the right in the painting) are known from nearly complete skulls and skeletons discovered in Ohio and other central western states.
The Tar Pools of Southern California (Mural VIII)
This mural represents a scene in southern California, in the vicinity of the Rancho-la-Brea deposits, including the remains of the astonishing group of animals caught in the asphalt trap, so splendidly represented in the collection of the Museum of History, Science, and Art, of Los Angeles.
The most characteristic animals of North and South America that lived during the Age of Man (see the south side of the hall) are known through some of the unique remains from the famous deposits of Rancho- la-Brea of southern California, especially the sloths, saber-toothed tigers, and wolves of the period—to which it is hoped that we may add some of the less abundant forms, like the camel and the horse. So far as possible, through exploration and exchange, this quarter section of the hall will represent the mammalian life of North America, in contrast with the mammalian life of South America during the same period of time.
A Loess Storm on the Pampas of Argentina (Mural IX)
A mural on the western wall (at the left) of the Hall of the Age of Man presents a South American scene during the Old Stone Age. It depicts the ancient pampas of Argentina with the winding river La Plata in the background, and a typical extinct mammalian fauna. In the distance at the right a violent dust storm is transporting columns of fine, impalpable dust known as loess.
The Museum is extraordinarily rich in the great Pampean Collection presented by certain of the trustees in 1899. This collection shows the close connections between North and South America in glacial times.
One of the most wonderful fossil groups in the Museum, if not the most wonderful, is the sloth and glyptodont group (center of southern side of the Hall of the Age of Man). This group is still in preparation.
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28 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
It includes five sloths of three varieties (the Mylodon, Lestodon and Scelidotherium) and three glyptodonts. These animals, so entirely diff- erent in external appearance and habits, nevertheless belong to the same order of mammals, the Edentata, which, as its name implies, is distinguished by the absence of enamel on the teeth. It is important to bring these two animals together in the same exhibit, so as to show the very wide contrasts in adaptation which may occur within the limits of a single mammalian order: the sloths covered with long hair and with vestiges of armature embedded in the skin, the glyptodonts nearly hairless, and encased in powerful bony armature, which renders them completely immune to attack by the saber-toothed tiger of the period.
Appendix The Family Tree of Man By William K. Gregory
Man is no doubt vastly superior to his distant relatives the an- thropoid (man-like) apes. His brain and mind are on far higher levels of development, he walks erect, he is able to speak. Man has a long line of ancestry of his own, extending for perhaps two million years or more, far back into the Age of Mammals.
Yet the science of comparative anatomy has revealed the fact that man is constructed upon the same general anatomical plan as that of his more backward relatives, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, and that he is connected with them by a very large number of anatomical marks of distant kinship. The common plan, with differences in detail, upon which man and the great apes are constructed, becomes more and more evident and indisputable as our practical knowledge and experience of human and comparative anatomy increase.
The science of comparative anatomy, in combination with the science of paleontology, has provided the basis for the exhibit called “The Family Tree of Man,” which is an attempt to present in a simple graphic form what is accepted by the best scientific authorities.
The Primates first became distinguishable from other orders of mammals very early in the Age of Mammals, that is, some three million years ago, according to the most conservative estimate. The first Primates were already adapted for living in trees and had grasping hind feet, but as may be judged from their small crania, they were greatly inferior in brain development to their modern descendants. This stage of evolution is represented in the exhibit by a cast of the skull of an extinct primate, Notharctus osborni, from the Middle Eocene of north- western Wyoming.
The next two stages of ascent are so far known only from two small lower jaws dating from the Lower Oligocene of Egypt. In the first of
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 29
these, Parapithecus, the lower jaw and dentition are intermediate in character between the Eocene tarsioid primates and the oldest anthro- poid. In the second jaw (Propliopithecus) the number and position of the teeth and the form and detailed arrangement of the cusps of all the teeth are exactly such as would be expected in the common starting point for the divergent lines leading to the gibbons, to the higher apes and to man,
In the long ages of the Miocene epoch (which is at the beginning of the second half of the Age of Mammals) there was a great branching out into different lines on the part of the primitive anthropoid stock, some of which began to foreshadow the modern gorillas and chimpanzees, while others (e.g., Szvapithecus) showed certain pre-human characters in the jaw and molar teeth.
By the latter part of the Age of Mammals the pre-human stock had probably become broken up into several distinct species, some of which were more backward, others more progressive toward higher types. The most backward of these early pre-human races was the Pithecan- thropus or Ape-man, from the Upper Pliocene (late Age of Mammals) or Lower Pleistocene (early Age of Man) of Java. The top of his skull is strongly reminiscent of the apes and indeed it was long debated whether Pithecanthropus was a progressive ape, or a primitive man; but the im- print of the frontal lobes of the brain on the inside of the skull show that he was an extremely primitive man, perhaps ancestral to the Heidelberg and Neanderthal races.
The Dawn Man (Koanthropus) of the Upper Pliocene, or Lower Pleistocene of England, had a more progressive type of brain case than that of Pithecanthropus, but his lower jaw was very ape-like, lacking a bony chin.
The Heidelberg jaw (Lower Pleistocene age, Germany), although already definitely human, is probably several hundred thousand years old. The jaw is of great size, with retreating chin and primitive human teeth.
The Neanderthal Race occupied Europe in the latter part of the Glacial period. The head is large, but the forehead is low, with strongly projecting brow ridges.
The Cré-Magnon race occupied Europe in the closing stages of Glacial times. It was in a high stage of evolution and belongs with modern races of man in the species Homo sapiens.
The Australian aboriginals represent one of the most primitive of the surviving races of man. They are probably distantly related to the most primitive peoples of India and to the early stock of the white races.
The detailed relationships of the other races of men are illustrated in special exhibits in the Introduction to Anthropology, now on the second floor, extreme west tower.
Fig. 6. The progress of primitive man as shown by his tools and weapons. A. IMPLEMENTS TYPICAL OF THE EARLY PALEOLITHIC AGE
1. Hand-ax or chopping tool of flint.
2. Dagger or perforating tool of flint.
3. Implement of flint for various purposes, such as cutting and scraping.
B. IMPLEMENTS AND ORNAMENTS TYPICAL OF THE LATE PALEOLITHIC AGE
Knife blade or spear point of flint.
Knife or etching tool of flint.
End scraper or planing tool of flint.
Harpoon point of bone.
Lance point of bone.
Beads or pendants of elk teeth.
Beads of univalve shells.
Fragment of bone with partial outline of a horse etched upon it.
Fragment of bone with traces of geometric ornamentation.
ONANBWUPWNH
30
4
5 6
Fig. 7. The progress of primitive man as shown by his tools and weapons (continued).
IMPLEMENTS TYPICAL OF THE NEOLITHIC AGE
1. Ax-hammer of stone, perforated for hafting.
2 Ax of flint, partly polished.
3. Saw of flint, one edge notched.
4. Dagger of flint, probably in imitation of metallic form.
5. Knife or sickle blade of flint.
6. Arrow point of flint, also made in larger sizes and used as spear points.
31
HISTORICAL PERIOD EXISTING MAMMALS NEOLITHIC|]PERIOD MASTODON(?)MAMMOT H
GRENELLE CRO-MAGNON
STONE CULTURES
AZILIAN MAGDALENIAN SOLUTRIAN
AURIGNACIAN GRIMALDI
REINDEER MAMMOTH WOOLLY RHINOCEROS
COLD MOUSTERIAN
NEANDERTHAL
WARM MOUSTERIAN
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS HIPPOPOTAMUS
COLD ACHEULEAN
WARM
ACHEULEAN KRAPINA LATE CHELLEAN
EHRINGSDORF
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS
CHELLEAN HIPPOPOTAMUS
Pl Ava Oss Siac
EARLY CHELLEAN
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS RHINOCEROS ETRUSCUS HIPPOPOTAMUS SABRE-TOOTH
HEIDELBERG
CROMERIAN
ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS MUSKOX PILTDOWN ? REINDEER
Fig. 8. Sequence of Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) in Europe. The order in which the races of primitive men appeared in Europe and the most striking mammals living at the same time.
FOR THE PEOPLE
FOR EDUCATION
FOR SCIENCE
WN Vel > Hie
| THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
THE HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
GUIDE LEAFLET SERIES No. 52 THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED MAY, 1925 leihacdiee 1925, by The Ameritan Museum of Natural History
NEANDERTHAL MAN
Modeled by Dr. J. H. McGregor on cast of skull found at La Chapelle aux Saints, France, in 1908.
teil -OF THE AGE OF MAN
By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN
Third edition revised and enlarged. Edited by William K. Gregory
THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY Guide Leaflet No. 52 May, 1925
The HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN is designed to show what we know of Man and his environment during the long period of geologic time in which man rose from a condition of limited intelligence and sub- ordination to the Animal World to his present condition of great intel- ligence and mastery both of the Animal World and of many of the prin- cipal forces of Nature.
The exhibit is arranged in an educational manner so as to present very simply, very truthfully, and very clearly, our actual knowledge, and not to confuse the visitor with theories or speculations.
The actual fossil remains of Man are represented by casts which are colored as nearly as possible to duplicate the originals which are to be found only in the great museums of Europe. Great pains have been taken to secure casts of the latest discoveries in various parts of the world. The beginning of this collection was a gift of Dr. J. Leon Will- iams in 1915, and it is constantly being amplified by gifts from other friends and from museums abroad.
The models and restorations and mural paintings of man and of the great mammals among which he lived and struggled represent the knowledge of more than a century of exploration and anatomical study by the leading students of Comparative Anatomy and Pal- ontology from the time of Cuvier in 1790 to the present period.
a4 i og crys SS a a od Trinit APE-MAN NEANDERTHAL MAN Cr6-MaGnon Man Pithecanthropus erectus Homo neanderthalensis Homo sapiens Fig. 1. THrer Great Races or Presistortc Man.
Models by Professor J. H. McGregor.
The Hall of the Age of Man in the
American Museum By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN Third edition, revised and enlarged. Edited by William K. Gregory
The exhibits in the Hall of the Age of Man is intended to illustrate what is known of the origin, relationships and early history of man, as deduced from his remains and primitive implements, and also to show the animals by which he was surrounded in the early stages of his existence. These animals are shown not only as mounted skeletons but in a series of large mural paintings portraying them as they appeared in the flesh amid their natural surroundings. These paintings are the result of the study of their fossil remains and their careful comparison with related existing animals, a work to which the author has devoted many years of study. Hence they give an accurate and vivid idea of the animals that were the contemporaries of early races of man in various regions of the world.
A series of cases in the center of the hall are devoted to the story of man, and that it can be compressed into so small a space is an indication of the scarcity of his re- mains, for here are displayed reproductions of the most notable specimens that have been discovered. It has been necessary to use copies, for the actual specimens are few in number and scattered through many museums in widely separated parts of the world.
HE beginning of the Age of Man, some 500,000 years ago, roughly estimated as the close of the Age of Mammals, marks in reality but the beginning of the close of the Age of Mammals. The
extinction of the most superb mammals that the earth has ever produced, during the early stages of human evolution, progressed from natural
2
6 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
causes due directly or indirectly to the Glacial epoch. With the intro- duction of firearms the destruction has proceeded with increasing rapidity, and today it is going on, by the use of guns and steel traps, at a more rapid rate than ever. By the middle of this century man will be alone amid the ruins of the mammalian world he has destroyed, the period of the Age of Mammals will have entirely closed, and the Age of Man will have reached a numerical climax, from which some statisticians believe it will probably recede, because we are approaching the point of the over-population of the earth in three of the five great continents.
Man as a Primate
A few of the more striking points of anatomical agreement between men and apes are illustrated in the first A case, which shows comparative series of skulls, lower jaws, and teeth.
In this exhibit skulls of the great man apes (at the right in Case I) are placed for comparison with those of some of the known extinct or fossil races of man, each ascending along a line of its own. Copies of the most recent discoveries in various parts of the world are placed in this series; in fact, this entire exhibit is designed to show from time to time our progress in discovery, to present actual evidence in place of theories and speculations, and to show how very limited this evidence is as compared with the abundant evidence in the ancestry, for example, of the horse (shown in the Hall of the Age of Mammals).
The Ascent of Man
Man has a long line of ancestry of his own, perhaps two million or more years in length. The cradle of the human race was, in our opinion, in Asia, in regions not yet explored by paleontologists. One reason that human and prehuman fossil remains are rare is that the ancestors of man lived partly among the trees and forests; this does not mean that they were arboreal; they lived chiefly on the ground.!. Even when living in a more open country the ancestors of man were alert to escape the floods and sandstorms which entombed animals like the horse of the open country and of the plains. Hence fossil remains of man as well as of his ancestors are extremely rare until the period of burial began.
[This refers only to the higher, more recent ancestors of man. The most thorough studies of the anatomy of the foot of man and other primates have brought strong support to the view that the human foot has been derived from an earlier ape-like stage in which the great toe could be used in climbing. W. K. G.]
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Fig. 2. Skull fragments found by Dawson and Smith Woodward in 1911, 1912; jaw fragment found by Dawson in 1912; canine tooth found by Father Teilhard de Chardin in 1913; nasal bones found by Dawson in 1913; single worked flint found near original skull fragments by Smith Woodward. Jaw one-third natural size; other fragments a bit larger than one-third (distorted somewhat by camera).
Fig. 3. A, side and top views of jaw of first Piltdown man, with first and second lower molar teeth in place. B, side and top views of first lower molar tooth of second Piltdown man. About three-fourths natural size.
9
Fig. 4. The ‘Heidelberg jaw,’’ found at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany. About one-third natural size.
Fig. 5. Sand-pit at Mauer, near Heidelberg. X marks the spot where the jaw was found, in place and beneath 79 feet of glacial and post-glacial deposits.
10
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 11
The earliest known human remains of the Trinil, Piltdown and Heidelberg races consist principally of portions of skulls, of jaws, and teeth. Individuals of the prehistoric races of Europe are now repre- sented by casts in the Hall of the Age of Man. The museum series began in 1915 with the gift of the J. Leon Williams Collection, and has been enriched by additions from the museums of London, Paris, and recently by the Neanderthal man of Krapina, presented by Professor Kk. Gorjanovié-Kramberger, through the kindness of Col. C. W. Furlong; also the Talgai skull from South Australia, presented by Dr. Stewart A. Smith.
The earliest known man is the Foxhall man, known at present only , by his flint implements, partly burned with fire, found near the little hamlet of Foxhall, near Norwich, on the east coast of England. These flints, discovered in 1921. constitute the first evidence that man of sufficient intelligence to make a variety of flint implements and to use fire existed in Britain at the close of the Age of Mammals; these are the first traces of true Tertiary man ever found.
The Trinil ape-man, the Pithecanthropus of Java, is the lowest of the known human or subhuman races. It is called ape-man because it is more human than ape-like. The restored head by Professor J. Howard McGregor, of Columbia University, is designed to show its half human, half anthropoid resemblance, as suggested by the top of the cranium, the only part known, which is far more human than that of any ape cranium, and at the same time far more ape-like than that of any human cranium. It is not impossible that this ape-man is related to the Neanderthal man. The exact geological age of the formation in which the original Pithecanthropus remains were discovered has been difficult to settle. The other fossil mammal remains found in the same formation, according to Dubois, Boule and other authorities, were essentially similar to those of the Upper Pliocene age of Europe. On the other hand, according to the geologist Blanckenhorn, the exact rela- tions of the formation to those above and below it indicate a Lower Pleistocene age. In any event the antiquity of the Pithecanthropus, in terms of ordinary human experience, is certainly very great, probably not less than 500,000 years.
The Most Ancient Human Races, Piltdown and Heidelberg A fragmentary skull, the greater part of the right half of the lower jaw, and an ‘isolated tooth, represent the first found remains of the Piltdown man, discovered in England in 1911-12 by Charles Dawson.
Replicas Of the two avatar teeth which were found near the skull-fop, in the same torm- ation. The peeth probably boldly with the skull tm mony featunes they closely resemble those of same arom orang-vtaas
Gog Ri e@e AN
Photographs of the ovlar teeth found near the skull-top of Pithecanthropus. in comparison with tecth of Orang-utans and of an Australian black man
LDEST RACES OF MEN No. 1. THE TRINIL RACE OF JAVA
(Pithecanthropus erectus)
PITHECANTHROPUS; THE APE-MAN OF JAVA Skull top, cast of endo-cranial cavity, femur and teeth (casts). The labels are in the hand- writing of Dr. Dubois, the discoverer of this remarkable specimen by whom these casts were
presented.
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 13
Several reconstructions of the Piltdown skull have been made, the first being that by Professor A. Smith Woodward, now in the British Museum. Another was made in this country, by Professor J. H. McGregor.
The problem whether the Piltdown jaw belongs to this human skull or whether it belongs to a fossil chimpanzee is now considered settled, because a second specimen of the Piltdown man has been found two miles from the first in the same Piltdown gravels; this specimen has the same kind of lower grinding teeth and the same form in the bone of the forehead. The skull itself is of a primitive human type, the brain cast showing a lowly development of the higher cerebral association centers (Elliot Smith, 1922).
In the deposit that contained the Piltdown remains were found some flint implements of Chellean type and two lots of fossil mammal remains, mostly teeth. The first lot were badly waterworn and had probably been washed out of an older deposit and then redeposited. The second lot, like the human bones, were not waterworn, and are believed by many geologists to be of the same age as the human remains. This lot included teeth of beaver, horse, deer and hippopotamus, animals which have been found elsewhere in Europe in association with flint implements of Chellean type. For these reasons Obermaier and other authorities refer the Piltdown remains to an early phase of the Chellean culture stage of the Lower Paleolithic (Lower Old Stone Age). Its age in the geological time scale may be in either the first or the second Interglacial time of the Pleistocene epoch.
Unquestionably the next most ancient human relic which has thus far been discovered is the jaw of the so-called Heidelberg man, a fossil which may be 250,000 years old. It is notable for its great size and for its lack of a protruding bony chin. The Heidelberg man may be ancestral to the Neanderthal man.
The Neanderthal Race
The Neanderthal man represents the oldest fossil human race of which the skeleton is fully known. The remains are very abundant, and the American Museum owns reproductions of many skulls and parts of skulls found during the last half century in Spain, Germany, France, and Hungary. Foremost of these is the skulleap found near Diisseldorf, Germany, in 1856, which constitutes the type of the Neanderthal race itself.
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16 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
Of great interest is the reconstruction by Professor McGregor of a Neanderthal female head, based upon a skull found at Gibraltar in 1848, which gives us the head characters of the women of this very primitive race.
Nearly perfect is the skull from La Chapelle-aux-Saints, originally restored by Professor Marcellin Boule, of Paris, and reconstructed by Professor McGregor; this distinguished American expert in the anatomy of palzeolithic man is now engaged upon the reconstruction of the entire skeleton and body of the Neanderthal man. This life-sized Neanderthal model will be one of the most interesting exhibits in the American Museum; it represents many years of laborious study and research by Professor McGregor, who was sent by the Museum on a special tour through Europe to examine all the known fossil remains of the Neander- thal race, representing forty or fifty individuals altogether, including the last specimen to be found, that of La Ferrassie, France, which is now being described by Dr. Boule.
The Rhodesian Race
The most recent discovery is the Rhodesian man, Homo rhodesiensis, made in 1921, in a cave at the Broken Hill Mine, northern Rhodesia, Africa, where the human remains were found in association both with stone and bone implements, and with broken bones of animals which had evidently been used as food. This man was in the Stone Age of industry, using scrapers and knives of quartz and quartzite. The forehead is very low and the ridges above the orbit are excessively prominent; the opening for the nose was very wide, but the palate and teeth are like those in existing races. The brain is of a very low human type of the capacity of 1,280 ¢.c. (see Smith Woodward’s Guide, pp. 29-31).
The Neanderthal Flint Workers
The mural of the Neanderthal group of flint workers shows in the distance, along the Dordogne River, herds of woolly rhinoceroses. The center of interest is the flint industry, which, with the chase, oecu- pied the entire energy of the Neanderthals. Since the Neanderthal type is totally different from any modern human type, it must be studied from models of its own. The group is very carefully arranged to show the physical characters of this man: the knees slightly bent in the peculiar standing posture, the broad, heavy shoulders, slightly stooped, and the massive neck and the head set well forward. In the back- eround is the famous cavern of Le Moustier, which gives its name to the Mousterian period of flint industry pursued by the Neanderthals.
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HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 19
The Cro-Magnon Race of High Type
The highly evolved Cré-Magnon race entered Europe from the east and drove out the Neanderthals. The Cré-Magnons were people like ourselves in point of evolution, and the characters of the head and cranium reflect their moral and spiritual potentiality. This was a race of warriors, of hunters, of painters and sculptors far superior to any of their predecessors. The contrast between the Cré-Magnon head and those of the Neanderthals which precede them is as wide as it possibly could be. It is intellectual and thoughtful.
Although these people lived at the very close of the long glacial period, they are far older than the Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations, which we ordinarily think of as being of the utmost antiquity.
Cré-Magnon Artists Painting the Mammoth
One of the recent murals in the Hall of the Age of Man (over the door- way opposite the Cré-Magnon exhibit) represents four of the Cré- Magnon artists actually painting the great fresco in the cave of Font-de- Gaume, Dordogne, France. The writer has been studying the composi- tion of this group for years, with Mr. Charles R. Knight, artist, aided by advice of the Abbé Henri Breuil of the Institut de Paléontologie Humaine, Paris, as well as of Mr. N. C. Nelson, archeologist at the American Museum of Natural History.
There are six figures in the group; four are depicted partly nude to show their anatomy in contrast with that of the Neanderthals. The two half-kneeling figures are holding up small lamps to illuminate the smooth surface of the limestone wall on which the procession of mammoths is being depicted. The half-erect figure represents an artist with pointed flint incising the outlines of a mammoth on the wall. The fully erect central figure represents an artist laying on the colors. A kneeling figure is preparing the colors on a rock. This design enables the painter to show the tall, slender proportions of the men of this Cré-Magnon race. The standing figure to the left is that of a chieftain clothed in well-made fur garments, who carries on top of his staff his baton de commandement as the insignia of his rank. The only illumination is that of the flicker- ing wicks in the small oil lamps.
Contrast Between the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) and the New Stone Age (Neolithic)
The men of the Old Stone Age lived in Europe during the immensely
long periods when the great glacial ice-sheets gradually extended from
the mountains out into the open regions, and then as slowly drew back
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Fig. 6. The progress of primitive man as shown by his tools and weapons. A. IMPLEMENTS TYPICAL OF THE EARLY PALEOLITHIC AGE
1. Hand-ax or chopping tool of flint.
2. Dagger or perforating tool of flint.
3. Implement of flint for various purposes, such as cutting and scraping.
B. IMPLEMENTS AND ORNAMENTS TYPICAL OF THE LATE PALEOLITHIC AGE
1. Knife blade or spear point of flint.
2. Knife or etching tool of flint.
3. End seraper or planing tool of flint.
4. Harpoon point of bone.
5. Lance point of bone.
6. Beads or pendants of elk teeth.
7. Beads of univalve shells.
8. Fragment of bone with partial outline of a horse etched upon it.
9 Fragment of bone with traces of geometric ornamentation.
22
5 6
Fig. 7. The progress of primitive man as shown by his tools and weapons
(continued).
IMPLEMENTS TYPICAL OF THE NEOLITHIC AGE Ax-hammer of stone, perforated for hafting. Ax of flint, partly polished. Saw of flint, one edge notched. Dagger of flint, probably in imitation of metallic form. Knife or sickle blade of flint. Arrow point of flint, also made in Jarger sizes and used as spear points.
Car Orp es CONN SF
23
STONE CULTURES
HISTORICAL
AZILIAN MAGDALENIAN SOLUTRIAN
AURIGNACIAN
COLD MOUSTERIAN
WARM MOUSTERIAN
COLD ACHEULEAN
WARM ACHEULEAN
LATE CHELLEAN
CHELLEAN
PAE = Oy asta te
EARLY CHELLEAN
CROMERIAN
FOXHALLIAN a
PE RO EXISTING MAMMALS NEOLITHIC|PERIOD MASTODON(?)MAMMOT H
GRENELLE CRO-MAGNON
GRIMALDI
NEANDERTHAL
KRAPINA
EHRINGSDORF
HEIDELBERG
PILTDOWN ?
REINDEER MAMMOTH WOOLLY RHINOCEROS
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS HIPPOPOTAMUS
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS HIPPOPOTAMUS
ELEPHAS ANTIQUUS RHINOCEROS ETRUSCUS HIPPOPOTAMUS SABRE-TOOTH
ELEPHAS PRIMIGENIUS MUSKOX REINDEER
Fig. 8. Sequence of Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) in Europe. The order in which the races of primitive men appeared in Europe and the
most striking mammals living
at the same time.
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COLORED PEBBLES FROM MAS D’AZIL. FRANCE (From Obermaier’s Fossil Man in Spain)
25
26 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
before the increasing heat of the summer seasons. The woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the wild horse, and later the reindeer, were abun- dant, and were hunted by the skilled makers of chipped flint imple- ments. The men of the New Stone Age, on the other hand, came into Europe after the greatest severity of the glacial climate had passed, and were surrounded mostly by forms of animals still existing. While not possessing the wonderful artistic ability of their predecessors, the Cré- Magnon cave artists, the men of the New Stone Age made pottery and cloth, and erected great sepulchres and temples of stone for their dead. They lived in more or less settled communities and depended upon an artificial food supply, raising cereals and keeping flocks and herds, instead of depending wholly upon hunting. Thus they were the true forerunners of civilization. Their skulls and skeletons also show that they belong to races still existing, including the Alpines or Central Euro- peans and the Mediterraneans or South Europeans.
The Azlian or Transitional Period Between the Old Stone Age and the the New Stone Age
The people that colored the pebbles pictured on page 25 lived in the transitional period, called Azilian, between the Old Stone Age and the New Stone Age. Like the men of the Reindeer Age (Magdalenian, or close of the Old Stone Age) they made small chipped flint imple- ments for planers and knives, and awls and polishers from bone; but their flint implements were very small and angulate. Because of the increasing scarcity or absence of the reindeer, which had been abundant in the dry, cold climate of Magdalenian times, the Azilians were forced to fashion their harpoons out of stag antlers. Unlike their predecessors they did not make the beautiful engravings and sculptures of animals on bone or draw realistic animal pictures on the walls of caves.
On the other hand they differed from their successors of the New Stone Age in that they had no pottery or domesticated animals.
Colored Pebbles from Mas D’Azil, France (From Obermaier’s Fossil Man in Spain, 1924) These colored pebbles were found in the great cavern of Mas d’Azil, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, about forty miles southwest from Tou- louse, France. The cavern had been frequented by men of many suc-
cessive ages, who left no less than nine layers of deposits ranging from the Early Magdalenian (late Old Stone Age) through the Neolithic (New
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 27
Stone Age) to the Iron Age of the Gauls and Romans. The pebbles were found in the sixth layer, above the late Magdalenian layer, and just below the Neolithic level. Thus the people that used the colored pebbles lived in the transitional period (Azilian) between the Palo- lithic and the Neolithic. The pebbles are painted on one side with perox- ide of iron, a deposit of which is found in the neighborhood of the cave. The symbols, in some cases at least, are conventionalized designs from earlier and more realistic representations of objects. Their use is not fully known—perhaps they might have been pieces in a game, or ‘‘luck stones.”
Men of the New Stone Age
Men of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, continued to use chipped stone implements, but unlike their predecessors, they often polished them. They were the direct forerunners of civilization. They culti- vated the ground, raising cereals, and had domesticated cattle and other animals; they made pottery and wove textiles; they lived in villages of huts, often built on piles near the shores of lakes. They erected sepulchres and temples of huge stones (dolmens, megaliths)
The Neolithic Stag Hunters
This mural group also is in its place in the hall (at the west end) having been completed in 1919. It represents men of the Nordic race, brown- or fair-haired, hunters of the stag, living along the southern shores of the Baltic in the earliest stage of the New Stone Age, a stage known as the Campignian from remains of huts and rudely polished stone imple- ments found near Campigny in France. The scene is on the border of one of the northern beech forests and represents the return from the hunt. After the ardor of the chase the hunters have thrown off their fur garments. The chieftain in the center is partly clad in furs; in the coming winter season he will be wholly fur clad. His son, a fair-haired youth with a necklace of bear claws, grasps a bow and arrow and holds in leash a wolf dog, ancestor of the modern sheep dog of northern France. The hunters, with spears tipped with stone heads, are resting from the chase. Two vessels of pottery indicate the introduction of the new ceramic art, accompanied by crude ornamentation.
This race was courageous, warlike, hardy, but of a lower intelligence and artistic order than the Cré-Magnons: it was chiefly concerned, in a rigorous northern climate, with the struggle for existence, in which the qualities of endurance, tribal loyalty, and the rudiments of family life
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HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 29
were being cultivated. Rude huts take the place of caverns and shelters, which are now mostly abandoned.
These were tall men with high, narrow skulls, related to the existing Nordic race, more powerful in build than the people of the Swiss Lake Dwellings. Skulls and skeletons representative of this hardy northern type are abundantly known in Scandinavia, but have not as yet found their way to our American Museum collections.
The Great Fossil Mammals Contemporaneous with and Hunted by Man
The Hall of the Age of Man contains four chief collections of the mammals of the world during the period of the Age of Man. In Europe man hunted the reindeer, the wild horses and cattle, and the mammoth. He used the hide of the reindeer for clothing, the flesh and marrow for food. He carved the bones as well as the ivory tusks of the mammoth.
The successive cultural stages appear to have originated first in Egypt and southwestern Asia, whence they spread into southeastern Europe, finally reaching northwestern Europe.
The mammoth, the northern, hairy type of elephant known to early explorers of fossil remains, was foremost among the great mammals hunted by man. The previous history of the proboscidean order is also shown in the Hall of the Age of Man.
This is one of the romances of evolution quite equal in interest to the evolution of the horse and the collection in the museum is remarkably complete. The early stages in the evolution of the proboscideans, beginning with the Palxomastodon discovered in the Faytim region of northern Africa, carry us back into times far antecedent to the Age of Man, namely, into an early period of the Age of Mammals, the Oligocene. Thus the visitor can see here the entire history of the evolution of the proboscideans, which taken altogether is the most majestic line of evolu- tion that has thus far been discovered. The evolution of the proboscid- eans culminates in the mastodons and mammoths.
Four Scenes in the Glacial Epoch The four great murals on the north wall of the Hall of the Age of Man represent scenes near the close of the Glacial epoch in the Northern Hemisphere. These four scenes belong in the same period of geologic time, namely, the final glacial stage, the period of the maximum advance of the glaciers over the entire Northern Hemisphere, of the most intense
30 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
cold, and of the farthest southward extension of the northern types of mammals. This is the time of the Cré-Magnon race, and our knowledge of the mammals, reindeer, and rhinoceroses is derived from the actual Cré6-Magnon paintings and etchings, chiefly those found within the caverns. The murals are as follows:
Midwinter.—The woolly rhinoceros in northern France.
Early Winter——The reindeer and mammoth on the river Somme, France.
Midsummer.—The mastodon, royal bison, and horse on the Mis- souri River, in the latitude of Kansas.
Autumn.—The deer-moose, tapir, and giant beaver, in northern New Jersey.
Glacial Midwinter in Northern France
The woolly rhinoceros, like the woolly mammoth, was heavily en- wrapped in hair, beneath which was a thick coat of fine wool. With this protection the animal was quite indifferent to the wintry blasts which swept over the steppe-like country of northern France. This golden- brown wool is actually preserved on the side of the face of one specimen discovered, which is now in the Museum of Petrograd (Leningrad). The head of the rhinoceros was long and narrow, like that of the white rhi- noceros of Africa, but the jaws were narrower and the upper lips were more pointed. It is an animal quite distinct from the great white rhinoceros still extant in Africa, which is a grazer with broad lips. In the distance in the painting are shown the saigas, antelopes which wandered over France at that time, and a group of woolly mammoths.
Early Winter Scene on the Somme River in Northern France
The scene represents the two herds, reindeer and mammoth, migrating southward from the banks of the river Somme. These rein- deer and mammoths are, in fact, depicted very precisely in the paintings and engravings left by the Cré-Magnon artists—especially in the cavern of Font-de-Gaume. It is a striking fact that, in the case of the mam- moth, every painting, drawing, etching, and model which the Cr6- Magnon man has given us exhibits exactly the same characters: the long hairy covering, the very high hump above the forehead, the notch between the hump and the neck, the very high shoulders, the short back, the rapid slope of the back over the hind quarters, the short tail. There is no doubt that, aided by these wonderful Palxolithic designs, the artist, Mr. Knight, has given us a very close representation of the actual appearance of the woolly mammoth.
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HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 33
Midsummer on the Missouri
The summer scene on the Missouri River (on the parallel of Kansas) represents the region south of the farthest advance of the ice sheet. The mastodons are grouped in such a manner as to show the characteristic low, flattened head, the long low back, the symmetrical fore and hind quarters, the extremely short, massive limbs, and the very broad and massive hip region as seen from behind. In the center of the picture stands the majestic Bison regius, the royal bison, known only from a skull, a superb specimen with the horn cores attached, in the collection of the American Museum. These animals were like gigantic buffalo or bison, beside which the modern buffalo would appear very diminutive. The characters of the hair and wool are not known, but it is assumed that they were similar to those of the existing buffalo, since the paintings of the bison by the Cré-Magnon artists in France all show the distinc- tive beard below the chin. At the right is a group of wild American horses of the period, the last of their race in this country; the species is Equus scott?7, the skeleton of which has been discovered in northern Texas.
Early Autumn in New Jersey
The autumn scene in northern New Jersey embraces three very distinctive North American types of the period, all of which have be- come extinct. The deer-moose, Cervalces (to the left), was described by Professor W. B. Scott, of Princeton, from a single skeleton found in the marl beds of northern New Jersey, which is now preserved complete in the Princeton Museum. The American fossil tapir (in the center) is known from sparse remains, the best of which were among the earliest discoveries of the pioneers of American paleontology. The giant rodents of the genus Castoroides (see two individuals at the right in the painting) are known from nearly complete skulls and skeletons dis- covered in New York, Ohio and other central western states.
The Tar Pools of Southern California
This mural represents a scene in southern California, in the vicinity of the Rancho-la-Brea deposits, including the remains of the astonishing group of animals caught in the asphalt trap, so splendidly represented in the collection of the Museum of History, Science, and Art, of Los Angeles.
The most characteristic animals of North and South America that lived during the Age of Man (see the south side of the hall) are known through some of the unique remains from the famous deposits of Rancho-
POMP Cee
e : eee Painted by Charles R. Knight, under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Copyrighted photograph
THE MASTODON
This distant relative of the elephants may have been a contemporary of early man in the closing phases of the period of the glaciers, in North America. The average mastodon was under nine feet in height, but he was very heavily built, being nearly twice as broad as an elephant.
34
Painted by Charles R. Knight, under the dire ction Henry Fairfield Osborn. Copyrighted photograph
THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH
This great elephant was characteristic of the latter part of the period of the glaciers in Europe. He wa hunted by the Cré-Magnons. Owing to differences in scale of the figures the Mammoth is made to appea much larger than the Mastodon which was not the case. The Mammoth was a few inches the taller, about th size of the Indian Elephant, but the Mastodon was much the bulkier, and very much the heavier of the two.
35
36 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
la-Brea of southern California, especially the sloths, saber-toothed tigers, and wolves of the period—to which it is hoped that we may add some of the less abundant forms, like the camel and the horse. So far as possible, through exploration and exchange, this quarter section of the hall will represent the mammalian life of North America, in contrast with the mammalian life of South America during the same period of time.
A Loess Storm on the Pampas of Argentina
A mural on the western wall (at the left) of the Hall of the Age of Man presents a South American scene during the Old Stone Age. It depicts the ancient pampas of Argentina with the winding river La Plata in the background, and a typical extinct mammalian fauna. In the distance at the right a violent dust storm is transporting columns of fine, impalpable dust known as loess.
The Museum is extraordinarily rich in the great Pampean Collec- tion presented by certain of the trustees in 1899. This collection shows the close connections between North and South America in glacial times.
One of the most wonderful groups of fossils in the Museum, is the sloth and glyptodont group on the southern side of the Hall of the Age of Man): this includes five great sloths of three species (the Mylodon, Lestodon and Scelidotherium) and three glyptodonts. These animals, so entirely different in external appearance and habits, nevertheless belong to the same order of mammals, the Edentata, which is distinguished by the absence of enamel] on the teeth. It is important to bring these two animals together in the same exhibit, so as to show the very wide con- trasts in adaptation which may occur within the limits of a single mammalian order: the sloths covered with long hair and with vestiges of armature embedded in the skin, the glyptodonts nearly hairless, and encased in powerful bony armature, which may have protected them from attack by the saber-toothed tiger of the period.
Appendix The Family Tree of Man By William K. Gregory Man is no doubt vastly superior to his distant relatives the an- thropoid (man-like) apes. His brain and mind are on far higher levels of development, he walks erect, he is able to speak. Man has a long line
of ancestry of his own, extending for perhaps two million years or more, far back into the Age of Mammals.
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NORTHERN i Lapps ASIA Esquimaux
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A Thibetans Manchus J. &. Ss? Cro-Magnons rmen
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Te a OF MANKIND “SP AUSTRALIA
Australians FROM CENTRAL ASIA.
Since remains approximately a half million years old, identified as those of man, have been found in England, in Germany and in Java, it is apparent that early man was a great traveler. Did an ancestral race live in central Asia’ Mongolia and Tibet are a favorable geographic region for the beginning of man, who is usually held to have originated in one place and branched widely.
Chinese
Siamese
44
HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN 45
Yet the science of comparative anatomy has revealed the fact that man is constructed upon the same general anatomical plan as that of his more backward relatives, the gorilla and the chimpanzee, and that he is connected with them by a very large number of anatomical marks of distant kinship. The common plan, with differences in detail, upon which man and the great apes are constructed, becomes more and more evident and indisputable as our practical knowledge and experience of human and comparative anatomy increase.
The science of comparative anatomy, in combination with the science of paleontology, has provided the basis for the exhibit called “The Family Tree of Man,” which is an attempt to present in a simple graphic form what is accepted by the best scientific authorities.
The Primates first became distinguishable from other orders of mammals very early in the Age of Mammals, that is, some three million years ago, according to the most conservative estimate. The first Primates were even at that early time adapted for living in trees and had ’ grasping hind feet, but as may be judged from their small crania, they were greatly inferior in brain development to their modern descendants. This stage of evolution is represented in the exhibit by a cast of the skull of an extinct primate, Notharctus osborni, from the Middle Eocene of northwestern Wyoming.
The next two stages of ascent are so far known only from two small lower jaws dating from the Lower Oligocene of Egypt. In the first of these, Parapithecus, the lower jaw and dentition are intermediate in character between the Eocene tarsioid primates and the oldest anthro- poid. In the second jaw (Propliopithecus) the number and position of the teeth and the form and detailed arrangement of the cusps of all the teeth are exactly such as would be expected in the common starting point for the divergent lines leading to the gibbons, to the higher apes and to man.
In the long ages of the Miocene epoch (which is at the beginning of the second half of the Age of Mammals) there was a great branching out into different lines on the part of the primitive anthropoid stock, some of which began to foreshadow the modern gorillas and chimpanzees, while others (e.g., Sivapithecus) showed certain pre-human characters in the jaw and molar teeth.
By the latter part of the Age of Mammals the pre-human stock had probably become broken up into several distinct species, some of which were more backward, others more progressive toward higher types. The most backward of these early pre-human races was the Pithecan- thropus or Ape-man, from the Upper Pliocene (late Age of Mammals) or
46 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
Lower Pleistocene (early Age of Man) of Java. The top of his skull is strongly reminiscent of the apes and indeed it was long debated whether Pithecanthropus was a progressive ape, or a primitive man; but the im- print of the frontal lobes of the brain on the inside of the skull show that he was an extremely primitive man, perhaps ancestral to the Heidelberg and Neanderthal races.
More ape-like than Pithecanthropus but a step above the gorilla is the skull of the man-ape found towards the end of 1924, at Taungs, Bechuanaland, Africa and named by its describer, Prof. Raymond A. Dart, Australopithecus africanus.
According to Professor G. Elliot Smith “if the progress in the direction of the human family is only slight, it is very important because it is not partial, but affects so many details of the face and skull, and it involves the brain, which obviously is the real criterion of any advance towards the intellectual supremacy of the human family.”’
The Dawn Man (Koanthropus) of the Upper Pliocene, or Lower Pleistocene of England, had a more progressive type of brain case than that of Pithecanthropus, but his lower jaw was very ape-like, lacking a bony chin.
The Heidelberg jaw (Lower Pleistocene age, Germany), although already definitely human, is probably several hundred thousand years old. The jaw is of great size, with retreating chin and primitive human teeth.
The Neanderthal Race occupied Europe in the latter part of the Glacial period. The head is large, but the forehead is low, with strongly projecting brow ridges.
The Cré-Magnon race occupied Europe in the closing stages of Glacial times. It was in a high stage of evolution and belongs with modern races of man in the species Homo sapiens.
The Australian aboriginals represent one of the most primitive of the surviving races of man. They are probably distantly related to the most primitive peoples of India and to the early stock of the white races.
The detailed relationships of the other races of men are illustrated in special exhibits in the Introduction to Anthropology, now on the second floor, extreme west tower.
SUCCESSION OF PREHISTORIC AGES IN EGYPT AND IN EUROPE
FROM THE CLOSE OF THE OLD STONE AGE UPWARD N. C, NELSON, 1921
eee ore BATE | EQVPT & S, W. ASIA | SOUTHEAST EUROPE | NORTHWEST EUROPE
0 1000 B.C. 2000 B.C. 3000 B.C. 4000 B.C. 5000 B.C. 6000 B.C.
7000 B.C.
8000 B.C
9000 B.C.
10000 B.C.
11000 B.C.
12000 B.C.
13000 B.C.
14000 B.C.
15000 B.C
16000 B.C.
17000 B.C
AURIGNACIAN
18000 B.C
19000 B.C.
20000 B.C
48 HALL OF THE AGE OF MAN
The Taungs Man-A pe
Australopithecus
The most recent discovery of a link in the chain of human descent was made at Taungs, Bechuanaland, Africa, and is the fossil skull of a young ape, which shows greater resemblance to man than does that of any other ape.
Dr. G. Elhot Smith, from whom we quote,! notes that this state- ment ‘‘must be qualified by the explanation that the step in advance had not carried far beyond the status of the Gorilla. But if the progress in the direction of the human family is only slight, it is very important because (a) it is not partial, but affects so many details of the face and skull, and (b) it involves the brain, which obviously is the real criterion of any advance towards the intellectual supremacy of the human family. This infant ape had a brain almost as big as the largest adult gorilla’s, so that in the adult Australopithecus it may have attained to a size of 650 or even 700 c.c. If this is only about half the average dimensions of the modern European brain, it is within 250 c¢.c. of the earliest and most primitive human brain so far discovered—that of Pithecanthropus, the capacity of which was about 900 c.c., or at most 950.”
Dr. Smith places Australopithecus just below Pithecanthropus, and possibly Hesperopithecus, in the Family Tree of Man, the one being a Manlike Ape and the other an Apelike Man.
At this time, May 1, no casts of this specimen have reached the United States.
1Australopithecus, the Manlike Ape from Bechuanaland. “Illustrated London News”—Feb. 14, 1925, p. 240
* rik
FOR THE PEOPLE FOR EDUCATION
FOR SCIENCE
_ AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
THE STORY OF _ MUSEUM GROUPS
By FREDERIC A. LUCAS
|
| GUIDE LEAFLET SERIES, No. 53 NOVEMBER, 1921
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GROUP OF GOLDEN EAGLES
Mounted in 1877
und,
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Booth Museum, Brighton, Engl
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 5
object in mounting animals, especially mammals, was to preserve them and put them in a condition to be studied and compared one with another. Groups were not even thought of and, as Dr. Coues wrote as late as 1874: “‘Spread eagle’ styles of mounting, artificial rocks and flowers, etc., are entirely out of place in a collection of any scientific pre- tensions, or designed for popular instruction. Besides, they take up too much room. Artistic grouping of an extensive collection is usually out of the question; and when this is unattainable, halfway efforts in that direction should be abandoned in favor of severe simplicity. Birds look best on the whole in uniform rows, assorted according to size, as far asa natural classification allows.’ The only use of groups was for a few
R. BOWDLER SHARPE
Under whose auspices the first of the bird groups was installed in the British Museum
SIR WILLIAM HENRY FLOWER DIRECTOR OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM FROM 1884 TO 1898
Sir William Flower probably did more than any other man to change the char- acter of museum exhibits and make them attractive as well as instructive. He not only planned the exhibits and gave his personal attention to their installation, but in some instances he prepared the specimens himself. In this country like credit should be given to Dr. G. Brown Goode, who was an ardent admirer of Flower and his work in the British Museum
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
~I
ROBIN REDBREAST GROUP IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
private individuals and they were mainly heterogeneous assemblages of bright-plumaged birds brought together from the four quarters of the globe and shown simply because they were pretty.
So far as we are aware, the introduction of groups into public mu- seums was due to the influence of an enthusiastic private collector, Mr. E. T. Booth, of Brighton, England, who devoted a large part of his life to making a collection of British birds, mounted in varied attitudes, with accessories that copied more or less accurately the appearance of the spot where they were taken. As Mr. Booth wrote, ‘‘the chief object has been to endeavor to represent the birds in situations somewhat similar to those in which they were obtained; many of the cases, indeed, being copied from sketches taken on the actual spots where the birds themselves were shot.’’ These groups were intended to be viewed from
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THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 9
JULES VERREAUX
Naturalist, Explorer, Taxidermist, Founder of the Maison Verreauz that led to the creating of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment
the front only and were arranged in cases of standard sizes, assembled along the side of a large hall. The collection, which was begun not far from 1858, was bequeathed to the town of Brighton in 1890, and is known as the Booth Museum, and we earnestly hope that it may endure for many years to come.
Montagu Brown of Leicester adopted the methods of Mr. Booth and a little later, in 1877 or 1878, through the instrumentality of R. Bowdler Sharpe, the first small “habitat group”’ of the coot was installed in the British Museum, then at Bloomsbury Square. Now it is rather
10 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
interesting to note that some naturalists who are best known by their scientific work, and are usually regarded by the public as being of the dry-as-dust type, were among the earliest advocates of naturalistic methods in museum exhibits. Thus, to Dr. Sharpe, whose enduring monument is the British Museum Catalogue of Birds, and to Dr. Gunther, best known for his systematic work on fishes, we are indebted for the introduction of groups into a great public museum and for obtaining for them the recognition of a scientific institution of long standing.
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BLACK-THROATED LOON One of the nesting groups of British birds in the British Museum
The installation of bird groups in the British Museum made good progress under the administration of Sir William Flower, who took especial interest in the educational side of museums and in the introduc- tion of exhibits that were attractive, as well as instructive, to the general visitor. :
The first group in the American Museum, an Arab courier attacked by lions, was purchased .in 1869 and shown in the old Arsenal building in Central Park, then the home of this institution. This group may have been theatrical and “bloody,” but, as a piece of taxidermy, it was the most ambitious attempt of its day. Moreover it was an attempt to
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 11
show life and action and an effort to arrest the attention and arouse the interest of the spectator, a most important point In museum exhibits. If you cannot interest the visitor you cannot instruct him; if he does not care to know what an animal is, or what an object is used for, he will not read the label, be it never so carefully written. The Arab courier group was prepared under the supervision of Jules Verreaux, the French ornithologist and African traveler, for the Paris Exposition of 1867, where it was awarded a gold medal. This group may have suggested the combat between a lion and tiger, displayed in the Crystal Palace, or that, as well as a similar group formerly in the Calcutta Museum, may have originated independently. The last mentioned group illustrates the importance and effect of something that attracts attention: when the Dalai Lama visited the Caleutta Museum, it soon became apparent that he was looking for some particular object, and it later developed that this was the fighting lion and tiger whose fame had traveled into far distant Tibet.
It is worth noting here that the Maison Verreaux suggested to Profes- sor Henry A. Ward the possibility of establishing a similar institution in the United States; whence the well-known Ward’s Natural Science Establishment at Rochester, New York. And we cannot help feeling that Ward’s Establishment had much to do with the history of animal groups. Hither came and hence departed many a man who directly or indirectly did much to advance the art of taxidermy and make possible the existing order of things. Named according to the time of their coming, Hornaday, Webster, Wood, Critchley, Turner, Denslow, and Akeley were all graduates of the old Establishment. Perhaps some of them do not like to be considered as taxidermists, but we can hardly call my friend Wood, whose birds lack nothing save voice and movement to make them seem alive, an animal sculptor, and we hope no one will take offense at being called a taxidermist. If he who delves among books in various dead and living languages to decide which of the numerous many-syllabled names some small creature is rightly entitled to bear does not object to being called a taxonomist, he who works upon the skins of creatures great and small should not object to the rightful name of taxidermist. So taxidermist let it be for the present, or until a better name is coined.
As there are so-called sculptors, who are mere makers of figures, and will be that, and that only, to the end of their days, so there are taxider- mists, men like Akeley, Clark and Blaschke, who are sculptors in every sense of the word. And in some ways their task is more difficult than that of the sculptor who deals only with plastic clay, for the taxidermist has not merely to prepare his model, but to fit overit a more or less un-
12 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
yielding hide, a hide that does not conceal the defects of the model but has defects of its own to be hidden. Probably no one who has had actual experience in mounting large mammals would question this, though probably few visitors realize the great progress that has been made in the mounting of animals, particularly large mammals. Not very many years ago animals were most literally stuffed—suspended head downward and rammed full of straw, often until they could hold no more. Then came the making of a manikin of tow and excelsior; next the manikin of wire- netting and papier-maché, and finally the modeling of the animal in clay, copying all the folds and wrinkles of life, the molding of this in plaster and in this mold making a light and durable form, or manikin, upon which the skin is deftly placed.
Here again Mr. Akeley has improved upon himself and perfected an entirely new plan fer mounting large mammals whereby they are at once more readily modeled, infinitely lighter and vastly more permanent.
Thus methods changed and improved, by far the ManIkIN OF WIRE CLOTH AND PapreR-MACHE. greatest advance being due By Remiand Joseph Santens. Photograph to tO Akeley, who devised the illustrate strength of modern manikin light, strong manikin just
alluded to, now in general use. There were various tentatives by others, and it should not be for- gotten that many years ago C. J. Maynard employed a plaster cast made from a clay model and that years before this Peale made a manikin of wood, the limbs being carefully carved to give the muscles the swell proportionate to their action: this method he used especially for animals that had not an abundance of hair.
Unfortunately, it seems never to have occurred to the users of plaster that museum specimens are moved about and plaster casts can be made light and strong. Hence they made their manikins solid, or almost solid, with the result that it required an effort to lift so small an object as a fox, and took four strong men to handle a deer, while the specimens were racked by their own weight and wreaked damage to everything with which they came in contact.
Group oF ORANG-UTANS IN THE AMERICAN Museum. Collected and mounted in 1880 by W.T. Hornaday. This was the first large mammal group in the American Museum [|Manikin of excelsior and tow]
This cut, reproduced from a wood engraving in Harper's Weekly, isareminder of the time when half-tones were unknown
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14 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
PAPIER-MACHE MANIKIN FOR AN ORANG-UTAN.
Remi Santens
by him shortly after his return from a two years’ collect- ing trip around the world and present- ed to the Museum by Robert Colgate.
This again leads us to note that the energy of Dr. Hornaday had much to do with the formal intro- duction of animal groups into the American Museum
of Natural History ~
and recognition of their place in mu- seum work, because Jenness Richardson
By
I know not who mounted some of the pieces, fair to look upon, that it has been my misfortune to handle during the past few years even, but I do know that I have many times and oft vigorously cursed their perpetrator and wished that he who devised the process had died in early in- fancy.
The group. of Arab and Lions was followed about a deeade later, 1880, by the group. of orangs collected by Hornaday, mounted
THE FRAMEWORK OF MUNGO
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 15
BISON COW AND CALF A detail of the Group of American Bison mounted in 1889 by Jenness Richardson,
Head of the Department of Taxidermy, American Museum of Natural History, from 1886 until his death in 1891
was a pupil of Hornaday, and Rowley in turn a pupil of Richardson, and by them and under their supervision was begun the series of groups now justly famous.
These early groups did not find their way into museums without protest, as may be imagined from the remarks of Dr. Coues quoted on a previous page, but in 1887 the first group of mammals was installed in the United States National Museum, and this was followed a year later by a large group of bison.
The other day, when listening to the protest of a curator against the withdrawal of a certain group from exhibition, we wondered if he re- membered another protest against the introduction of a bone that a coyote might have some excuse for action. Verily tempora mutantur.
An important factor in the evolution of groups and their introduc- tion into museums was the development of the art, for art it is, of making accessories, for without the ability to reproduce flowers and foliage in materials that would at once have the semblance of reality, and endur- ance under the vicissitudes of temperature in the intemperate zone in
16 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
which most museums are located, half the charm and value of groups would be lacking. For progress in this direction we are indebted prima- rily to the Messrs. Mintorn of London and their sister, Mrs. Mogridge, who reproduced the foliage in the groups of birds in the British Museum, and later came to New York to carry on the same work for the small bird groups,! though their methods have been replaced by one devised by Akeley.
Prior to this wax leaves and flowers were made of pure sheet wax and were necessarily fragile, though in many cases really very beautiful. The art of making them was one of the accomplishments of artistically inclined ladies half a century or more ago and directions for making them may be found in Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s Magazine, interspersed with directions and patterns for slippers and other worsted work.
Foliage of such fragile character was naturally not fitted for use in Museum groups, and the only leaves to be had by the aspiring taxidermist of 1880 were the heavy opaque cloth leaves made by manufacturers of millinery supplies, which at least had the merit of durability.
The Orang group in the American Museum of Natural History was provided with such leaves, and they were, at the end of thirty-five years’ service, replaced by more accurate copies of the foliage of the Durian.
The earliest bird groups in the American Museum of Natural His- tory, the first of which was very appropriately the American Robin, were made largely after those in the British Museum and installed each in a small case so as to be viewed on four sides. They thus differed from their prototypes in the Booth Museum which, as noted, were intended to be seen from one side only.?
They were all groups of small or moderate size and confined to species found within fifty miles of New York City. The time was not yet come, though it was near at hand, for the execution of the large naturalistic groups with which we are now familiar, and Museum officers and trustees would have hesitated to incur the time and cost involved in their preparation.
1A description of these methods, improved upon by apt pupils, isto be found in Plant Forms inWaz, Guide Leaflet No. 34, published by the American Museum.
2These early American Museum bird groups, thirty-four in number, have been brought together with the other ‘‘ Local Birds”’ in the west corridor of the second floor
1—Lioness. An example of early work
2—Arrican Lion. Mounted at the Maison Verreaux about 1865
3—Arnrican Lion, “Hannipau.”” Mounted at the American Museum of Natural History by James L. Clark in 1906.
17
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 19
NCE admitted into museums, a precedent established, and in- trenched behind the bulwarks of high scientific authority, groups slowly found their way into all museums and their scope extended to all branches of natural history as fast as opportunity offered and the skill of the preparator would permit. And to-day, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there is a friendly rivalry among museums as to which shall have the finest groups. Birds lend themselves more readily to groups than does any other class of animals; they combine beauty of form, pose and color with moderate size that permits ease of handling. Hence birds naturally were chosen for the first museum groups, and bird groups still predominate.
Just as naturally mammals followed birds and from mice to ele- phants have furnished many notable groups and many triumphs—and failures—for the taxidermist. After mammals came anything that the taxidermist or modeler could master—reptiles, fishes, insects and other invertebrates, and last of all plants, which copied by modern methods are ever green and may be made to show their adaptations to environ- ment and interrelations to varying conditions of soil, climate and sur- roundings.
Yea, the group idea has even been carried into the dim and distant past and in the hall of fossils one may behold a ghostly group of great ground sloths, or farther on, Allosaurus feeding upon Brontosaurus. And the ground sloths passed out of existence thousands cf years ago and Allosaurus has not felt the pangs of hunger for over six million years!
Fishes offer some of the most difficult problems; not only does their expression depend almost entirely upon their attitudes, but in many cases there is little of interest in their habits, orsmall beauty in their sur- © roundings, when they have any. And added to all these things is the ever present difficulty of making a fish suspended in air look as though he were swimming in water. Furthermore in the character of their integu- ment, fishes and amphibians furnish a practically insurmountable prob- lem in the way of mounting, which has led to much friendly discussion as to whether it is better to show a stuffed specimen that does not at all resemble the living animal or a cast that cannot be distinguished from it.
In this instance the writer is entirely on the side of those who offer “something just as good,” believing firmly that the object of exhibits is to hold the mirror up to nature and let it reflect an image of nature as she looks when alive, not as she appears when dead and shriveled. And if a cloth leaf and a glass eye are allowable, why not a way frog and a celluloid fish?
One of the first efforts in the line of fish groups, that by Mr. Alfred J. Klein in the Brooklyn Museum, showing the fishes of a coral reef, is
20 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
one of the best, partly from the nature of the subject, which affords more scope for attractive surroundings than is usually presented. And while the credit for this group, prepared in 1907, is entirely due to Mr. Klein, yet it really dates from a memorandum written in 1893 after an inter- view with Dr. Goode, ‘‘make a group of red snappers with natural sur-
THE WHARF-PILE GROUP
Marine group in the American Museum by Ignaz Matausch and other prepara- tors under the supervision of Roy W. Miner, 1914. It shows the sponges, hydroids, sea anemones and other invertebrate animals with which wharf piles in favored localities are crowded below low-water mark
’
roundings.”’ It embodies principles, carried to great perfection in the habitat groups, that were independently worked out in the construction of a group of octopus, forming part of the exhibit of the United States National Museum at the Chicago Exposition of 1893. Painted back- ground connected with the foreground, rounded corners and overhead
PORTION OF THE PADDLEFISH GROUP
In the American Museum of Natural History
OCTOPUS GROUP
This group was prepared by Dr. F. A. Lucas for the Chicago Exposition of 1893 and is at present in the United States National Museum. The animals were modeled in clay and cast in “‘cathcartine,”’ a mixture of glue and gelatin
21
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THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
lighting were all used in this small group, and while in comparison with what has been done since, it now seems a very crude little affair, yet it contained the germs of the beautiful Orizaba group.
The curved, panoramic background and overhead lighting—bor- rowed consciously or unconsciously from our eycloramas—permit the last touches in the way of illusion and control of light, regardless of the time
VIRGINIA DEER IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM
Virginia deer, American Museum of Natural History, mounted by Mr. Carl E.
Akeley in 1902. This is an example of work that has made modern taxidermy an art. The work of the taxidermist is in a way more difficult than that of the sculptor, that is, he must not only make a model of the animal in life-like pose, but must then with great art fit over this model the unyielding skin of the animal
of day. The octopus group embodied also another idea, brought to great perfection here by Miss Mary C. Dickerson, that of making a single mold serve for making many individuals. In the octopus group the animals were cast in gelatin compound and bent into diverse attitudes; to-day casts are made in wax, warmed and worked into many poses; a case of the parallel development that occurs in methods as well as in nature.
HOWLING MONKEYS
of Arts and Sciences, mounted by Mr. J. William 5 show the varied attitudes of the animals. ffect with instruc-
In the Museum of the Brooklyn Institute Critchley. It is a group whose main purpose is tc Such groups preceded the large naturalistic groups which combine artistic e tion and so greatly enhance the educational value of museums
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THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
PART OF THE LAYSAN ISLAND GROUP Made for the State University of Iowa by Homer R. Dill. This group shows a portion of the albatross rookery on the little island of Laysan where millions of birds find a home in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Background by Charles Corwin
The first bird groups, those in the British Museum and those here, were, if we may borrow a phrase once familiar, now almost obsolete, pre- Raphaelistic in their character—exact copies of the spot or surroundings where the animals were taken. The plants were counted and plotted on a diagram; sod, roots and shrubs were dug up and transported, often in the face of great difficulties, to the museum where the group was to be established, and there assembled in the exact and proper order of occur- rence. The next step was the habitat group, and here is where Dr. Frank M. Chapman comes into the story, for it is to him that we owe the series of nature pictures known by that name.
The habitat group does not copy nature slavishly, even though an actual scene forms the background; it aims to give a broad and graphic
THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS 27 presentation ofthe conditions under which certain as- semblages of bird life are found, to
“ bring home to the observer the atmo- sphere and vege- tation of some typical part of the country. But save inexceptional eases, the fore- ground does not exactly reproduce any given bit of country, although it does copy the plants and shrubs found there. How these groups were prepared, — what journeyings by flood and _ field they involved are told by Dr. Chap- man himself in Camps and Cruises of an Ornithologist and very briefiy in the leaflet describing these groups.
The habitat groups thus involved a slight departure from nature, in that while the background depicted an actual scene, the foreground was often generalized and this involves the whole question of how far it is allowable to depart from actualities. May we combine animals from different localities or show together those taken at different seasons? Shall we fabricate our soil and ‘‘fake”’ our trees? Personally the writer believes that all these things are permissible, with certain restrictions, nay, in some instances, must be done, not merely to make a group at all, but to enhance its educational value. For example, a bison in his winter coat may be introduced into a group with the mother and young and a baby moose placed with an antlered bull—in no other way can you complete the life cycle and tell the whole story.
Dr. Chapman found it physically impossible to bring away the water- soaked nests of the flamingoes; Mr. Cherrie found equal difficulty with
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THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS jl
the sodden nests of the guacharo birds, while to carry off the cave in which they were found would have defied even Hercules in his prime. Here certainly, fabrication is a necessity; and if so much, why not more? If we cannot import a tree from the forests of Venezuela, let us ““adapt”’ an ironwood from Vermont, whereon a colony of howling monkeys may disport themselves. In this case it is the animals and not their sur- roundings that are to be emphasized, and the accessories are a matter of secondary importance, merely a setting.
The first large group, the Bird Rock group, placed on exhibition in 1898, was not definitely planned as a habitat group, but merely as a picture of part of a famous and impressive bird colony and to make “a permanent record of this characteristic phase of island life.’”’, The Cobb’s Island group was the next and the first real habitat group to be con- structed, this subject being chosen partly because it provided a large and interesting group at small expense.
Year after year this series of groups has been extended, covering the country from east to west and north to south, until room is left for but one more, and that, it is hoped, will include the bird life of the Arctic regions.
The Bullfrog, Giant Salamander and Florida groups, particularly the latter, belong in still another cate- gory and may be termed synthetic, or life study eroups, bringing together in one composite picture a number of ani- mals that proba- bly would not be found in so small HEAD OF anarea at any one Mountain ; oe moment of the an Broom season depicted, Lyn Museum. but might all be
Mounted by found there at Remi Santens, some moment of
for many years at the season. Such Ward’s Establish- pak jai J, a group may, or
ment, now at Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh may not, repre-
THE BUTTERFLY GROUP The Monarch Butterfly—migrating
Butterflies, numbering more than 1200 specimens, mounted and placed by Charles Wunder, accessories by W. B. Peters.
32
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34 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
sent a particular spot ;it does depict the natural conditions under which the animals are to be found and shows them engaged in the most character- istic and interesting of their varied occupations. In this, the day of moving pictures, we may say that as the moving picture condenses into five minutes’ time the events of days or weeks, so these groups depict in a few square feet of space the life and happenings of a much larger area.
The group in its latest form is to be found in the Museum of the University of Kansas, where it includes a great part of the Museum, a special section having been constructed to contain a large cyclorama where the various North American animals from plain to mountain and from temperate to arctic America may be viewed approximately as they would be seen in nature.!| Somewhat similar is the Laysan Island group, executed for the State University, lowa, by Mr. Homer R. Dill, where the visitor gazes about him at the imposing assemblage of albatrosses and other sea fowl, while beyond the blue Pacific stretches to the horizon. Aside from these the bison and moose groups in this Museum, made by Richardson and Rowley, are the largest that have been made, and al- though they have been on exhibition for twenty-four and twenty years respectively, they compare favorably with those of to-day.
The African mammals, by Mr. Carl E. Akeley,in the Field Museum, are among the finest of their kind for pose and character, but the “ Four Seasons,” in the same museum and also by Mr. Akeley, depicting the Virginia deer in spring, summer, autumn and winter, represent high- water mark in this direction, combining as they do pictorial beauty with scientific accuracy of detail. It was while engaged on these groups that Mr. Akeley perfected the method of making the manikin, or artificial body on which the skin is placed, so as to combine strength, lightness and durability, and also devised methods for the rapid reproduction of leaves and a compound stronger and more durable than wax. The need for making leaves in large quantities is shown by the fact that in the “ Four Seasons,” the summer group alone called for seventeen thousand leaves.
Such, briefly, is the story of museum groups; they have grown from the little box containing a pair of birds and a square foot or two of their immediate surroundings, to entire colonies of flamingoes and albatrosses and the broad sweep of land or sea shown in the Orizaba and Laysan’ groups. Noone man can justly claim credit for the beauty and accuracy of such groups as may to-day be seen in our larger museums; many have contributed to this perfection and some stand preéminent among the rest. To each and all his just meed of praise. Some, whose work might
'This prepared by and under the direction of L. L. Dyche, is an amplification of his ideas as shown in 1893 in the Kansas Building at the World’s Fair.
THE GROUND SLOTH GROUP
The American Museum of Natural History
3
36 THE STORY OF MUSEUM GROUPS
now provoke a smile, labored hard and earnestly in the face of many discouragements to lay the foundations on which we build to-day. Some of whom the present generation has never heard, held out a helping hand to the youthful would-be taxidermist and by aid and encouragement started many of our best men on their career, and some, keen observers of nature, endowed with artistic spirit and possessed of technical skill, have perfected what others began.
Great progress has been made, especially in our newer museums, in the installation of habitat groups, notably those of mammals, during the seven years that have elapsed since the Story of Museum Groups was written. The most noteworthy among them are those prepared by Mr. John Rowley in the California Academy of Sciences, showing the char- acteristic large mammals of California. Not only are these groups not restricted in size but they have the great advantage of being installed in a hall planned and built for their display, points wherein Mr. Rowley has worked under conditions more favorable than those enjoyed by his predecessors. However, he expects to do even better in the series planned for the Los Angeles Museum.
The Public Museum of Milwaukee has placed on exhibition a number of groups, among them a series illustrating the habits and habitat of the races of man found in North America. In this connection should be noted the remarkably fine series of the Iroquois in the State Museum at Albany installed in 1915 and 1916, which reach high water mark in this direction. That habitat groups will, in the future, form an essential part of every important museum seems undoubted, but the question arises, though it is propounded very timidly, if there is not danger that the matter of groups may be overdone. Not every animal is worthy to be included in a habitat group and while it is the duty of a museum to present to the public Nature in her fairest forms, yet this should not be done to the exclusion of other important matters.
Furthermore the space demanded by groups, with the attendant cost of building and administration, necessarily limit groups, especially in our smaller institutions.
~—
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—
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
FOR THE PEOPLE
FOR EDUCATION
FOR SCIENCE
By LAURENCE VAIL COLEMAN, M.A.
GUIDE LEAFLET SERIES, No. 54 FEBRUARY, 1922
“| WATT a SR ae
SYA EU GANG
OMURED NOH ke.
ADOW GROUP
D) 4 |
HACKENSACK MI
Showing a great variety of foliage
——_—
A PORTION OF THE BULLFROG GROUP
Showing Pickerel Weed
Plants of Wax
How They are Made in The American Museum of Natural History
By LAURENCE VAIL CoLemMAN, M.A.
Plants of wax have become familiar to museum goers chiefly in connection with habitat groups of mammals, birds and reptiles. In fact, the impressiveness of a group often depends as much upon the accessories which enter into its composition as upon the specimens which it features, and therefore the making of artificial foliage has become an important branch of work in a museum’s studios.
The following account explains how plants are made in the American Museum. The method employed for leaves was devised and patented by Carl E. Akeley, and this brief exposition is published with his con- sent.
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
The principal materials required are bleached beeswax, cotton batting of good quality, annealed and stiff iron wire of various sizes, and a few tools, such as are shown in the cut. Fingers must do the rest; tools will not give mechanical ability any more than brushes and colors will make an artist. For delicate leaves, or the petals of flowers, mous- seline de soie, the mysterious “‘fabric”’ of the Mintorns, is needed. This was formerly used in making leaves, but has given way to the more practical and economical method of Akeley. The agate burnisher, a tool used by gilders, is rather a luxury and a home-made tool of brass or iron will serve the purpose. The use of this is to smooth down rough spots,
TOOLS USED IN MAKING LEAVES AND FLOWERS OF WAX
or points, and to weld together leaves like those of the pitcher plant that are made in two or more parts.
Do not be discouraged if your first efforts are not successful, or not as successful as you expected. Printed directions can give you only general principles; something depends on natural aptitude, much on care and patience. Try something easy first.
WAX LEAVES
In making artificial foliage the individual leaf is the preparator’s first concern. A fresh leaf makes the best model, though one preserved
PLANTS OF WAX
in a bath of formalin and glycerine! may be used. By word and picture let us follow the reproduction of a leaf.
MAKING A SQUEEZE MOLD
The original leaf is placed upon a bed of clay around which a clay wall is set up and the enclosure so formed is poured full of plaster
THE LEAF, RESTING ON A CLAY BED Ready for Making the First Half of the Mold
1A mixture of formalin 15 parts, water 35 parts and glycerine 50 parts is best for prolonged preservation of foliage. Leaves immersed in a stronger mixture for a few days and then removed and dried will usually retain their form and if so treated may be recolored and used for exhibition, but the result is seldom satisfactory.
oO
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
which covers one side of the leaf and soon sets. The clay is then removed, leaving the leaf and the plaster together. Two notches or keys are cut in opposite edges of the plaster to receive the keys of the second part of the mold and to prevent the two parts slipping on one another. The margin around the leaf is brushed with clay water or soap solution to
THE LEAF, RESTING ON THE FIRST HALF OF THE MOLD Ready for Making the Second Half
prevent the next layer of plaster from adhering to it, and for best results the soap is then swabbed off and a film of stearin applied; another wall is set up around the leaf and its plaster bed and into the little basin thus
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AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
formed is poured plaster which covers the second side of the leaf. When it sets, the two blocks of plaster may be separated and the leaf between them will have left its impression on the inner face of each. It will be seen that each key on the first block has now its mate on the second, for tongues of plaster from the last-poured mass have filled the notches cut in the first one. Thus the two parts interlock and fit together in -one position only.
THE WAX LEAF READY FOR TRIMMING
The mold is now set aside to dry and before using hardened by boiling in a strong solution of borax for about twenty minutes or soaking in melted paraffin for about the same time. Molds treated with paraffin give the best impression but are a little difficult to use on account of the tendency of the wax to stick to them. In case a mold is going to be used a great many times, it is best to soak it in linseed oil for five minutes and let it dry for a week or two.
PLANTS OF WAX
CASTING A WAX LEAF
When leaves are to be cast from a squeeze mold, the mold must be soaked in hot water and used while warm and moist. Heat keeps the wax from chilling’ till it fills the mold and moisture prevents it from ad- hering to the plaster. A film of cotton is laid upon one side of the mold— better the concave side if either one is so. A piece of cotton-covered hard iron wire! is laid along the line of the midrib, with its end projecting
THREE STAGES IN TRIMMING A VERY SIMPLE LEAF
to form a stem, and if the leaf be a thick one more cotton is laid on top. Melted wax, tinted green with oil colors, is then poured upon the cotton and the upper part of the mold squeezed down upon it. The whole is plunged into cold water, opened and the cast removed.
The wax should be bleached beeswax to which should be added about a tablespoonful of Canada balsam to each quart of melted wax, the object of the balsam being to toughen the wax. Wax should be
lor small leaves the cotton covered millinery wire of commerce is employed, but for larger ones it is desirable to use iron wire of a larger size. The wire is tapered with a file or on an emery wheel and then wrapped with cotton by twirling it through the fingers.
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
melted in a double boiler, such as is used for cooking oatmeal in order to avoid burning the wax and to lessen the danger from fire.
A HEAVY COMPLEX LEAF Showing the Wire Supports on the Under Side
The oil color is thinned with a very little turpentine and thoroughly stirred into the melted wax; this gives the body color of the leaf to be imitated.
It will be found that pressure aided by capillarity has forced the wax into a thin sheet which has engulfed the cotton and the wire so
10
PLANTS OF WAX
that neither can be seen, and that the excess of wax has run out around the leaf. The manipulations of casting may be performed in a fewseconds.
Much time is saved by using three molds in rotation so that while one is in use a second may be warming in hot water and a third with its east may be cooling in the cold bath.
A COMPLETE LEAF OF THE PITCHER PLANT And the Molds Used in Making One-Half of It
A Pair of Molds is Needed for Each Half of the Leaf, the Keel, Shown in the Picture Being Made on One of the Halves
In the case of large, heavy, and, especially, deeply scalloped leaves such as occur on many tropical plants, it is necessary to make a some- what elaborate complicated framework, such as is indicated in the figure,
11
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
by twisting together a number of wires so that one underlies each arm or part of the leaf. These wires are wound with cotton batting or gauze, tapering from their junction with the midrib to the tip.
In making these large leaves, it is often advantageous for two per- sons to busy themselves with a single mold, one person pouring the wax and the other manipulating the mold and removing the casts. For large parti-colored leaves two colors of wax, perhaps green and red, may be poured into the same mold.
METAL SQUEEZE MOLDS
A mold is sometimes attached to a large hinge or frame by means of which it may be opened or closed after the fashion of a lemon-squeezer. Metal molds— half type metal and half bronze—may be employed if a large number of leaves is required, and such a mold must always be attached to a hinged frame.
PLANTS OF WAX
FINISHING A WAX LEAF
The cast as it is taken from the mold must first be trimmed. Scissors are usually employed but the operation is not a simple one if the edge of the leaf be serrate. In this event, the scissors, which have been warmed, are jerked along, alternately cutting ahead and edging to the side. Then with a warm tool imperfections are removed, and finally the leaf is shaped between the fingers.
The wire which projects from the base of the leaf is wrapped with a strip of mousseline-de-soie (a gauze of the utmost delicacy) dipped in wax. Once more the tool is applied to the stem to obliterate all traces of successive windings and the leaf is finished save for a final coloring.
The manner of assembling leaves upon their stems is determined by the habit of the plant, the manner in which the leaves are arranged around the main stem. The leaves of herbs are lashed with thread to a wire of proper size to represent the main shaft of the plant, and the joints are wrapped with gauze, the windings being continued along the shaft. Stiff iron wire should be used for this purpose, and to insure a neat piece of work the end filed to a long taper. Leaves of trees are usually treated in the same way, only the tender twigs being reproduced, for the larger woody twigs need not be fabricated, but in their natural state serve as a base to which the wax tips are attached.
In fastening leaves to the woody twigs, a hole is bored diagonally through the twig with a fine drill, if you are fortunate enough to have one, or with a triangular glover’s needle held in a pin vise or set in a little wooden handle. The leaf wire is passed through the hole, bent down along the twig, and wrapped with gauze. In the absence of gauze, thin, tough brown paper, cut in narrow strips, will do fairly well.
When the work of assembling has been done, the final touches of color are applied. A large air-brush which delivers a spray of oil color thinned in turpentine is really a necessity where leaves are to be made in considerable numbers;» where only a few are wanted color may be stippled on with a brush or wad of cotton batting and good results may often be obtained by rubbing in dry color.
Frequently ten thousand leaves are needed for a single group, but it is rarely necessaryto make more than half a dozen sizes of one kind, so hundreds of leaves may be cast from a single mold.
Blades of grass are cut from heavily waxed gauze and are modeled by folding them lengthwise over the edge of a knifelike strip of tin fixed in a wooden base. Very little manipulation is required. No rib is used,
13
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
but each blade from a short distance above the base is rolled about a wire and several blades are then attached to a heavier wire stem.
In making cactus, the spines are removed and a piece mold made of the plant or of the various branches. In the case of such a form as the barrel cactus, the body is often made hollow to save wax and while still in the mold, backed with a lining of plaster and burlap.
WAX FLOWERS
Success in making artificial flowers depends largely upon ingenuity
A SPRAY OF DOGWOOD A Very Simple Flower
in the application of a few general principles, though to make small flowers on an extensive scale necessitates the use of dies, such as are shown in the cut and unfortunately, the making of dies calls for the services of an expert machinist. Large or medium-sized flowers, poppies, for example, can be made without any special appliances.
The first step is always to dismember the natural flower in order to determine its construction, and ordinarily it will be found to consist of a central bulb-like pistil surrounded by slender stamens, a set of petals
14
SHHMOTH ONIMVIN NI GHSO SHIC
AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLETS
collectively termed the corolla framing this heart and a calyx covering the junction of the flower with the stem.
When the pistil is large enough to be of any consequence it is cast upon the end of a wire which is later wound with waxed gauze to the size of the stem. The stamens are usually long filaments, each bearing a nodule or anther at its tip, and they are usually imitated with waxed threads or wires of which the tips are dippedin wax. To imitate stamens which are short, stout and numerous, it may be practicable to fray or lacerate one edge of a strip of waxed gauze and so to make a sort of limp comb which may be wound around the stem with the points upstanding.
The conspicuous and often highly colored corolla is either a group of separate petals or a cup formed by their fusion. The daisy and the morning-glory illustrate respectively these two conditions. Separated petals, if small, are usually cut or stamped with a metal die from waxed gauze, and for convenience they may sometimes be made in one piece, joined together at the bases. Large petals are usually cast Just as if they were leaves on a basis of gauze, or, if large, cotton batting, and are then welded to the stem one at atime. A “one-piece” corolla is split down one side and laid out flat as a pattern for cutting, stamping or casting similar pieces. Each artificial corolla is then curled around the stem like a cone and the two adjoining edges are welded together with a hot tool.
The basal calyx frequently has the form of a star, which may be punched out and the stem slipped through a hole in its center, but sometimes it is composed a large petal-like parts which must be made separately and attached to the stem.
The ground color of all parts is mixed into the wax of which they are made, and the finishing tints are applied by hand or with an air- brush which delivers liquid color as a spray.
16
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FOR THE PEOPLE
FOR EDUCATION
FOR SCIENCE
> oN
-BASKETRY DESIGNS
OF THE MISSION INDIANS -
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By A. L. KROEBER
JULY, 1922
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Two Handsome Mission Baskets
BASKETRY DESIGNS
OF THE MISSION INDIANS
By A. L. KROEBER
University of California
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY GUIDE LEAFLET No. 55
New York, Juxy, 1922
ll ®@ AMERICAN-MUSEUM-:PRESS ©
MISSION INDIAN BASKETRY DESIGNS
By A. L. KRorBeEr. University of California
Visitors to a museum are often impressed by the degree to which basketry looms up among the exhibits illustrating the life of the Indians of California and many other primitive peoples. Not only are baskets relatively more important owing to the want of many implements of furniture and utensils to which we are accustomed, but they are abso- lutely more numerous, varied, and showy than among ourselves. In many cases it is the very lack of development of other arts that has led to the special development of basket making. Among the California tribes the best of mechanical energy and ingenuity was exercised in this one branch of manual dexterity. It is not that the Indian possessed some mysterious faculty, some inborn gift, through which he could surpass us; but that he manufactures so few other things that he is able or com- pelled to devote a disproportionate amount of his interests in this special direction. There is little doubt that civilized people, if they took up the matter seriously, would outdistance the savage at his own game, in basket making as in other undertakings. Yet, when it comes to the actual fact, baskets are a comparative side-issue to us, notably in com- parison with other textile products, especially cloth. The result is that basket making remains a sort of starved stepchild of civilization, where- as it is the favorite son of many savage cultures.
This growth of basketry at the expense of other arts is particularly exemplified in aboriginal America by the tribes of California and the nearby regions. These peoples have always been reckoned among the most backward of American Indians in the general level of their attain- ments; but there is also a unanimity of agreement that their baskets excel those of most other tribes, in fact are probably preéminent on the continent, if not in the world. Living entirely in the Stone Age stage, the California Indians knew nothing of vessels of metal. The majority of them were ignorant of pottery making; and their wood working was so little developed that had they suddenly decided to replace some of their baskets by utensils of wood, they would have been very hard put to it to produce even partially adequate implements. People who build their houses of thatch, slabs of bark, or dirt thrown over a framework of sticks, and who navigate on rafts of rushes instead of in timbered boats, have obviously left their carpentering instinct undeveloped. It is a curious commentary on the mechanical limitations of these tribes that in spite of
3
| AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLET
the perfection of their hand woven textiles, they have been content to refrain from making the next step in the natural evolution of the industry, namely, to weave on a loom and thus produce simple fabrics.
[t is perhaps significant in this connection that their basketry art is wholly in the hands of women, who spend a great part of their lives, probably an average of several hours a day, in this occupation. They seem better able than men to provide the steady patience which is called for. The work never becomes quite automatic—in the making of a really good basket the attention can not wholly wander from the work in hand, even if the weaver has many years of experience. At thesame time there is no heavy strain on the attention, and no concentration of energy is called for. These requisites seem to be better satisfied by the feminine temperament. We have then this curious situation: the general in- dustrial backwardness of the California Indians is exemplified by their leaving the most important of their industries to their women; but the women have so far advanced this industry, that the men have no hand in the peak of attainment of the native culture on its material side.
With the art of basketry in such flourishing condition in this region, it was inevitable that the imagination of the more gifted individuals should be stimulated and new inventions made. As the native popula- tion is cut up Into a great number of local groups—more than a hundred tribes or linguistic units have been recognized in California—it might further be expected that newly devised methods would often spring up independently in separate localities, and that the final outcome would be a number of distinct arts in various parts of the area. This is exactly what has happened. Neighboring tribes, it is true, have often borrowed a new method of manufacture or a new style of decoration from the group that originated it; but on the whole, intertribal communication in aboriginal California had a limited range and such spread of new ideas remained restricted. The consequence is that we encounter about half a dozen quite diverse basketry arts in California; in addition, anyone whose interests lead him to closer study is usually able to learn to distin- guish the particular style of many single tribes.
Among these independent styles one of the most distinctive is that evolved by the Mission Indians, as they are generally called, the groups that inhabit the coast and mountain regions of Southern California from Los Angeles to San Diego.!. They derived their name from having been
1Gabrielino and Fernandetio; Mountain, Pass, and Desert Cahuilla; Juaneno; Luisefio; Cupefio; Northern and Southern Diegueno; and some of the Serrano. The Diegueno are of Yuman stock, all the others Shoshonean or Uto-Aztecan, The ware of the Chumash is closely affiliated but not identical.
MISSION INDIAN BASKETRY DESIGNS 5
brought more or less thoroughly under the influence of the Franciscan missionaries during the last third of the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth century. Their basketry is not as fine in texture as that made by some other California Indians; but they did, and do, good, even work when they wish to, and evince a peculiar originality and boldness in decoration that makes their ware of interest. This basketry may accordingly be described as reduced to the minimum on the technical side, but quite specially elaborated along certain ornamental lines; a quality that has often commended it to artists and collectors.
That a people should skimp technical aspects while evidently eager to develop the aesthetic ones, may seem unusual. Yet it must be noted that while the Mission Indian women do some poor work, their efforts on the whole are not directed so much to avoiding labor by fudging the manipulation, as to simplification of process. In other words, they seek a maximum of effect with a minimum of means; and this in itself argues a considerable accomplishment. Even if one aims at nothing more than a tolerable product, it takes some skill to achieve this with the mechanics of the work cut to the bone; and the best Mission ware is much more than tolerable.
This limitation of means in Mission basketry comes out in the matter of weaves. This is a complicated subject when followed out in detail; but it may be summarized by stating that the world over there are three principal types of basket weaving. The first, which includes checker work, wicker work, and twilling, is essentially a cloth weave made free hand in coarse materials. The basis of it is the simple in-and-out weave. That is to say, a single cross strand at a time is worked over and under the longitudinal ones. The second type is twining, which occurs in many varieties, all of which have in common the fact that two or more cross strands are introduced at the same time. This involves the fact that besides being worked in and out among the longitudinal elements, they must also be twined among each other; whence the name. The third process is that known as coiling, and, as has often been pointed out, is in strict accuracy a process of sewing rather than of weaving. The foundation elements are wrapped or lashed together, and this can be done only with the aid of an awl or needle. There is no set of parallel warps to serve as a basis, but the foundation strands or rods coil in a continuous spiral.
Now of these three processes, the first and simplest or in and out weave, was not used at all in Mission Indian basketry. This is the more remarkable because this weave is particularly rapid and satisfactory
6 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLET
where materials of the type of cane or bamboo are available, and South- ern California is a country in which cane is native. The second, or twined process, was known to the Mission Indians but remained very much stunted. Their twined baskets served only the most ordinary domestic uses, and were coarse, irregularly spaced in open work, and undecorated. While we acknowledge their existence in passing. we may eliminate them from further consideration here. The coiling process was thus the only one of much consequence in this art, and it is significant that whereas coiling can be executed in a variety of ways, as on a foundation of one rod, two rods, three rods, rods and splints, ete., the Mission tribes re- stricted themselves, deliberately as it were, to only one variety: namely, a multiple foundation consisting of a bundle of grass stems. In this sole technique they worked a variety of forms and achieved varied pattern effects.
The limitation of materials is no less remarkable. There are several dozen plants growing in Southern California abundantly enough to have been available as basket materials, and some of these, such as yueca and willow, were actually used in baskets by tribes of other regions. Yet practically all Mission basketry is made in three materials only: a particular species of grass serving as foundation, and either sumac or a rush as wrapping.!
Even in the matter of forms there is a greater restriction than is customary among the neighboring aborigines. Certain types of baskets were made everywhere in the California area except by the Mission tribes. We can account for their absence here by definite causes. Some centuries ago, the art of pottery making crept into southern California from Arizona and New Mexico, where it had flourished among the Cliff- Dwellers and Pueblos for thousands of vears. Being rather settled in their habits of life, the southern Californians were able to utilize clay vessels to an extent which would have been impossible—on account of among a nomadic people. Their cooking utensils were there-
1
breakage fore made of pottery, rendering it unnecessary for them to manufacture the watertight baskets in which the other California Indians did their cooking by means of hot stones. Then, a special burden basket, a deep, conical affair, shaped to sling on the back, such as the other tribes used for carrying loads, was dispensed with because the southern Californians had evolved the carrying net. This was a sort of small hammock, the ends connected by a rope or band passing over the forehead, while the
1B picampes rigens; Rhus trilobata; Juncus sp.
MISSION INDIAN BASKETRY DESIGNS
“J
bag of the net passed around the shoulders and hung over the back. Into this net a comparatively shallow basket, or at least a flat-bottomed one, could be set without spilling. In this way the peaked burden basket of the other tribes was eliminated.
When now we consider the effect of the technical limitations on the ornamentation, we find its results apparent in three directions.
First, the invariable coiling on a bundle of grass stems produces a certain thickness of texture. Through the fact that it must be a bundle, the group of stems cannot well reduce below a certain diameter, say a sixth of an inch. This means that the wrapping stitches which are sewn around and through the bundle must also be of considerable length, and tend naturally to be of some breadth. Small, delicate designs could con- sequently be worked only with difficulty: they would quickly reveal themselves as inadequate in effect. The Mission tribes therefore took the other tack, frankly made most of their designs large and heavy, and developed a good deal of feeling for the impression which can be obtained by patterns of blocks or gross masses, instead of depending on intricacy of arrangement of small elements.
Secondly, the coarse stitches could scarcely be made to look as even as fine ones. This circumstance cultivated in the mind of the weaver a disregard for sharp edges and nicety of pattern. She must often have had difficulty in bringing out the two sides of a design element exactly even, especially when she was carrying it around the curvature of the vessel. The outcome was, in some cases, an indifference to exact balance; whereas more daring workers met the situation by plunging deliberately into designs which avoid symmetry. This is a rather rare condition in basketry, and must be looked upon as one of the salient traits of the pattern decoration of Mission ware.
In the third place, the color scheme was affected by the nature of one of the basket materials to which the southern California Indian women had become addicted. The Juncus rush which is one of the two materials showing on basket surfaces, comes in a great variety of colors, from a cream white to a dark brown, with intermediate shades of yellow, reddish, olive, and gray. In fact, the stems vary so much that consider- able care is required if it is desired to give a basket a background of uniform color. Here again there are two avenues open, and both were followed. One was to be discriminating, and to match as closely as possible the stems that were worked into one basket. The other was to renounce the attempt at uniformity and openly strive for a patchy color effect. A great many Mission baskets are mottled almost like a mackerel
8 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLET
skin, and the effect is distinctly pleasing. In some cases the pattern is emphasized by shading the background in contrast with it. If the pat- tern is dark, the stitches and the background immediately in contact with it are carried out in specially light shades of the rush, as if to relieve the design.
Then, this variable rush which made dyes practically unnecessary— the only color artificially produced in Mission ware is black—stimulated the color imagination as such. The result is that, although Mission designs are basically built up of simple and often crude elements, they are in many cases worked out in two colors. There is an illuminating contrast on this point with tribes that employ other materials and tech- niques. The ware of the Pomo region, for instance, is far more delicately made, and the designs lighter and more intricate; but the pattern is always of one color only, either red alone or black. In short, the Pomo weavers suppressed whatever impulse they may have had in the direction of color elaboration and specialized in the development of forms; where- as the Mission Indians were generally content to compose their patterns without much complexity of design, but to add to their liveliness by variety of color.
Like many primitive peoples these Indians were very little inclined to turn their basket patterns into pictures. The decoration remains geometric and can nearly always be analyzed into fundamental elements of triangles, quadrilaterals, or bars. It is true that basketry, like cloth, does not lend itself readily to free-flowing lines and curves; but that such effects are not impossible is shown by the ware produced in some parts of the world and occasionally by the Mission Indians themselves. On the whole, however, we can commend the aesthetic feeling which led the weavers to avoid such attempts; which from the very nature of the technique can never be preéminently successful as pictures, and which usually lose in decorative effect ten times as much as they gain in realistic representativeness. Most of the few Mission designs that can be recog- nized as being pictures of something—rattlesnakes, birds, human beings, or the like—occur in comparatively modern pieces made after the weav- ers discovered that many white people take more interest in even a poor picture than in a beautiful geometric design that carries no meaning to them.
We are so accustomed to think of the Indian as backward and child- like that it is a great temptation to feel pleased, as it were, over his failures. The more crudely he does a thing, the more typical it is likely to seem to us, and the more eager we are to seize upon it. Of course this
MISSION INDIAN BASKETRY DESIGNS 9
crudity of his is especially emphasized when he attempts to imitate our- selves. In this matter of designs the Indian quite generally knew his limitations, and, left to himself, at least in many tribes, did not attempt to decorate by pictures, reserving these for his religious communications. He had however, like all human beings a sense for the beautiful; and dumb though he might be in expressing this in words, he instinctively knew the difference between an object having aesthetic value and one lacking it.
We must remember too that, owing to the very poverty of his life as compared with ours, the Indian was conservative, so that when a given style had once grown up it tended to flourish for centuries. This perma- nence would sooner or later make it probable that even in small com- munities artistically gifted individuals would be born who would add their contribution of quality or talent to the prevailing style. They would thus set up a standard of attainment which would serve as a model and could be pretty successfully imitated by the mass of weavers who set to work with less creative imagination but with much willing- ness to do their best. To every Indian group, however small, art con- sequently represents a truly national tradition. The best that many preceding generations have had to offer has gone into it. This is why such arts, whether they manifest themselves in basketry or pottery or beadwork or carving, almost invariably possess a genuine aesthetic merit no matter how limited they may be. Those among ourselves who possess artistic impressionability find little difficulty in entering into the spirit of such primitive arts. Possibly sometimes we are even more keenly alive to their values than the natives themselves. On the other hand the civilized person who prefers the childish and halting efforts at picture making in Indian textiles or beadwork, is characterizing himself as lacking in feeling for the best that native art really has to offer. He is gratifying a superficial or sensetional taste which is not artistic at all.
On the whole the Mission tribes, like many other Indians, are suffi- ciently imbued with feeling for their own aesthetic products to adhere rather firmly to the tribal styles. The disturbing effect of trade influences is perceptible in this ware, but has not yet cut very deeply. In some respects it has even proved stimulating. The baskets with mottled surface or subtle color effects find a readier sale than those of a severer color scheme. The result is that proportionally more of them are being made, and bolder effects being carried out on them than formerly. It is true that there are fewer Mission Indians than there used to be. Many of the younger generation have gone to school, and the mode of life is
10 AMERICAN MUSEUM GUIDE LEAFLET
each year coming to conform a little more to our own. There can thus be little doubt that ultimately this art will die out. It is far from dead, however; and on many of the little reservations that stud Southern California it is not only the old but also the middle aged women that still produce fine baskets. Even a returned school girl, innocent though she may be of such matters when first coming home, is likely to take up the industry as a means of providing herself with pin money, as soon as she discovers that if she can turn out competent ware in her idle moments, it will bring a satisfactory price at the trader’s or from the tourist. In this way, while civilization is on the one hand tending to destroy the integrity of this basketry art, it is on the other helping to keep it alive and is even stimulating it to new developments.
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ANALYSIS OF DESIGNS Figures 1-42
The cross (figs. 1-8) is a native design, as shown by its fundamental form: four blocks surrounding a rectangular space, as in figs. 1, 3, 4.
An elongated checkerboard arrangement occurs in bands (fig. 9), masses (figs. 10-12), and related rectangular forms (figs. 13-16).
Upright rectangles flanked by rows of right-angled triangles are characteristic (figs. 17-19).
An erect diamond with little light window-like spaces in it is shown simple in fig. 20, elaborated in 21—22, distorted in 23-24.
Simple diamonds are frequent, both in patterns and standing free (figs. 25-33). Note the characteristic asymmetries and irregularities in figs. 27-29.
One of the most typical Mission basket designs is a V or pair of spreading horns which are used free, in pattern repetition, and to elaborate other designs. Figs. 31 to 50 all contain this motive recurring through a series of designs of the greatest variety.
37 38 39 40 41 42
Figures 1-42
ANALYSIS OF DESIGNS Figures 43-84
Figs. 45-47 are notable as three variants on the identical basket, 45 being stand- ard and 47 the extreme of asymmetrical simplification.
Designs deliberately thrown out of balance appear in figs. 57-78. The asymmetry may be barely discernible, as in 66, 67, 68; prominent but yet super- imposed on an underlying symmetry, as in 65, 73; or fundamental, as in 60, 62, 76.
Fig. 64, representing a church, is a modern variant of the old native pattern seen In 52 and 53. See Plate I, fig. 1.
Triangles are the basis of designs 79-84. Figs. 81 and 82 evince a pleasing imagi- nation.
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43 44 45 46 47 Tr v Vv LY. Fo i » a a 50 51 52 53 54 Bee ee Y lah 55 56 57 58 59 60 ee LO” i! N AI Ye BEN 61 62 63 64 65 66 of <7 g WW 3 ne Seg ~~ “ Ml] 67 68 69 70 71 72 4 75 77 78 73 74 76 2 wow +a 79 80 81 82 83
Figures 43-8 t
ANALYSIS OF DESIGNS Figures 48, 49, 75, 77, 78, 84
These six figures illustrate some of the more complex basket pattern elements. Figs. 48 and 49 are built on the V or “spreading horns” concept, highly elaborated but nevertheless substantially regular. Fig. 75 is astep pattern, simple in motive, but tantalizingly irregular even within the two and a half repetitions shown. Figs. 77 and 78 are masterpieces of decorative invention repaying the most careful analysis. It should be remembered that designs like these are not outlined in advance but slowly evolved as the basket is built upward. Onasmall scale, the aesthetic process is similar to that operative in a richly decorated mediaeval Cathedral growing through several generations without an architect’s plan.
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78
Figures 48, 49, 75, 77, 78, 84
Figure 85
Figure 86
Fig. 85. The entire design on a flat basket, unusual in its semi-realism, yet handled with definite decorative feeling.
Fig. 86. Designs 18 and 83 are here shown as they actually appear on the inner surface of a Shallow basket. The elements occur at uneven distances; they are in- troduced 5 and 3 times respectively, instead of 4 and 4; and one of them is worked both with and without contained color.
—<————_——
Plate I. at and shallow Mission baskets—banded, radiating,
Pattern arrangements on fl In fig. 3 the elements are unevenly spaced;
spirally diagonal and crossing or zigzag. in 4 they are irregular; 3 and 5 show varying shades in different parts.
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Plate II. In deep baskets the design elements tend to run grosser than in flat ones: com- pare especially 1, 2, 83 with Plate I. The design in 4 is saved from crassness by the way its tints slide subtly from light to dark.
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[Reprinted from NAturAu History, Vol. XXII, No. 5, pp. 1-15, 1922] Copyright, 1922, by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, N. Y.
GEOLOGY OF NEW YORK CITY AND ITS VICINITY.
BY
CHESTER A. REEDS*
, NHE relief features of the New York City district consist of several distinctly different types,
which have been developed by natural
forces on rocks of unequal hardness
Some of the rocks are unconsolidated
sands and muds and are of comparatively
recent date; others are stratified with alternating hard and soft beds, which have been tilted or slightly folded and are older; still others of the same origin but far older have been so much altered and deformed during certain geologic periods that they have become crystal- line and entirely changed in appearance, that is, metamorphosed. Volcanic rocks thick and homogeneous in character have also been injected into the area at different times, some very early, others later, but none very recently. These and some of the crystalline ones form the most resistant ridges. The distribution
of the rocks is in the form of belts with a
prevailing northeast-southwest direction.
The essential relief features and physiographic provinces of the area are shown in a graphic manner on the relief map, p. 430. They may be summarized as follows:
1. The continental shelf, which repre- sents the submerged margin of the continent, extends eastward from the New Jersey shore for about too miles to the 100 fathom line. Beyond that point the sea floor drops rapidly to the great and extensive oceanic depths of 2000- 4600 fathoms.
2. The Coastal Plain is that portion of the former submerged continental shelf which has been raised above the sea with- out apparent deformation. Three well defined elements of this plain appear:
(a) Its inner lowland, partly drowned in Long Island Sound, Lower
New York and Sandy Hook bays, ex-
tends southwestward along the main railway lines through New Brunswick, Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington;
(b) Its fall line features appear on the Delaware at Trenton, on the Schuyl- kill at Philadelphia, on the Potomac at the Great Falls above Washington, D. C., and on the James River at Richmond;
(c) Its cuesta forms the foundation of Long Island, the Atlantic Highlands, and the ragged front making up the hilly belt of southern New Jersey.
3. The Newark Lowland is a plain developed on inclined weak strata con- sisting of red sandstones and shales of Triassic age. The intrusive sheets of resistant volcanic rock form the promi- nent residual ridges known as the Pali- sades, Watchung, Hook, Cushetunk and Sourland mountains, and Long and Rocky hills.
4. The New England Upland is repre- sented in the district by the Manhattan and Reading prongs. This upland con- sists of dissected and disordered crystal- line rocks. The Manhattan prong ex- tends down the east bank of the Hudson estuary from the Highlands to and including Manhattan Island. The nortd central portion of Staten Island is ah outlier. The Reading prong extends an highlands from the gorge of the Hudsos southwestward across New York ann New Jersey to Reading, Pennsylvania.
5. The broad valley to the west occu- pied by the Wallkill and Paulins Kill is a part of the great Appalachian Valley, which extends from Birmingham, Ala- bama, to Lake Champlain. It is one of the prominent subdivisions of the Newer Appalachian physiographic province.
6. The narrow Kittatinny Mountain ridge dipping westward, represents the northeastern extension of the belt of
*Associate Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology, American Museum
T
2 NATURAL HISTORY
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_ Sketch map of New York City and vicinity, showing position of the terminal moraine and directions of the ice movement (indicated by the arrows) during the last or Wisconsin glaciation.
After United States Geological Survey
newer and folded Appalachians of cen- tral Pennsylvania.
7. The Alleghany Plateau appears west of the Delaware River. Farther north in New York State the Catskill Mountains represent a subdivision of this plateau.
GLACIATION: The northern portion of the New York City district has been traversed at least four times by great sheets of ice which moved down from the Labrador center. These continental glaciers modified the drainage and the surface of the land over which they passed. The terminal moraine which represents the southernmost extent of the last ice field appears as a conspicuous ridge consisting of knobs and kettle holes on Long Island, Staten Island, and New
Jersey. It continues westward across the United States to the Pacific Ocean near Seattle, Washington.
The drift bowlders and unsorted rock débris in the terminal moraine and north- ward give a clue as to the direction of ice movement. Large bowlders of crystal- line rock from Jamaica and Hollis, Long Island, indicate that they were plucked out of the bed rock in the vicinity of Yonkers, Mt. Vernon, and other places in Westchester County, New York. Glacial-borne pebbles containing fossils and oolites have been found at Broadway and ro1st Street. The fossils represent minute fragments of bryozoa and corals, of Devonian age, which are similar to those found at present in the Catskill Mountain region. The oolites, which
GEOLOGY OF NEW YORK CITY AND ITS VICINITY 3
The ‘‘rocking stone,’’ New York Zodlogical Park, an ice-transported bowlder resting on a glaciated surface
are small, concentric spheres cemented together, resemble fish roe. They, too, came from up-state New York. On Staten Island, Long Island, and Short Hills, New Jersey, many large drift bowlders of sedimentary origin and con- taining numerous marine fossils were de- rived from the exposures in east central New York State.
Each of the four continental glaciers of the Pleistocene epoch consisted of ice thousands of feet thick. They not only plucked out huge bowlders the size of a house and transported them long dis- tances, but they also scoured off the soil- cover in many places and left bare rock surfaces, roches moutonnées, little deserts in fact, on which no plants other than lichens can grow. A good example of a glaciated surface with an ice-transported bowlder resting upon it is the “rocking
stone” in the New York Zodlogical Park, Bronx, figured above.
Rocks held firmly in the base of the ice served not only as abrasives but also as etching tools. Deep parallel grooves in crystalline rock appear at various places on Riverside Drive, particularly on the south side of the Drive where it leaves the Hudson River at about 2ooth Street. These glacial striae running northwest- southeast give the direction of ice move- ment. Many diabase bowlders from the Palisades found in Yonkers and New York City indicate that the ice moved southeasterly, diagonally across the Pali- sades and the Hudson River, as shown on the diagram.
A stream leaving the front of the glacier oftentimes contained a_ large volume of water and had considerable transporting power. Hence pebbles,
4 NATURAL HISTORY
Exposure of glacial till, containing sand, rock, at Castle Point, Hoboken.
sand, and fine rock débris were carried in considerable quantity. In most in- stances the streams deployed fanwise almost immediately on their emergence from the glacial sheet and the material carried from the ice was dropped close to the margin of the glacier. The fans formed by single streams were usually
gravel, and bowlders, in contact with Serpentine After United States Geological Survey, Passaic Folio, No. 157
small, being from half a mile to two miles in radius; confluent fans were larger, varying from one to six miles in radius. The materials are somewhat sorted and stratified and are called out- wash deposits. These deposits occur at short intervals along the southern margin of the terminal moraine. Towns built
GEOLOGY OF NEW YORK CITY AND ITS VICINITY
n
STORM KING
Cross-section drawing of the sediments in the Hudson River at Storm King Mountain, where
is located the great siphon of the New York City aqueduct.
State Museum
on some of the larger outwash plains are Plainfield, New Jersey; Flatbush and Hempstead, Long Island.
While glacial streams were depositing fan-shaped outwash deposits in many places along the ice front, a glacial lake, Lake Passaic, appeared to the south of the terminal moraine between the crescentic outline of the Watchung Mountains on the east and south and the New Jersey highlands on the west. The waters of the lake drained through the Muggy Hollow outlet at the southwest corner into the Raritan River valley. When the ice front retreated northward, the lake waters followed it and occupied the entire basin behind the Watchung Mountains to the west and southwest of Paterson, New Jersey. The numerous fresh-water marshes of today, along the upper course of the Passaic River, cover portions of the bed of this former glacial lake.
Great accumulations of glacial till, a mechanical mixture consisting of un- sorted clay, sand, pebbles, and small bowlders, are found generally in the wake of the glacier. In the New York
From Bulletin 146 of the New York
City district it varies from a fraction of a foot to 500 feet in thickness. A good exposure of it resting on Serpen- tine rock may be seen at Castle Point, Hoboken, New Jersey, p. 434. It often- times fills the pre-glacial stream valleys and frequently covers the leeward side of hills and the lower areas. Test holes in the Harlem River at High Bridge show that the channel has been filled up from 80 to 111 feet by glacial drift and river mud.
The glacial drifts and sediments in the Hudson River gorge at Storm King Mountain have been found by drilling operations to be between 768 and 995 feet thick, with an average of 800 feet. In the vicinity of the Pennsylvania Rail- road tunnels at 32nd Street, New York City, the sediments are 300 feet thick, with a possible greater depth in an untested section in midstream. In the Lower Bay deposits accumulated to such an extent that the mouth of the river was almost closed to large ships. Some $4,000,000 have been spent by army engineers in dredging the Ambrose Channel 2000 feet wide by 4o feet deep,
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8 NATURAL. HISTORY
so that the large ocean liners and other vessels may enter the harbor. From a point ten miles out from Sandy Hook to the edge of the continental shelf about one hundred miles distant, a well-defined river channel exists which increases in depth seaward. Near the brink of the continental platform it is 4800 feet deep. Glacial deposits appear over a portion of the course.
RECENT SHORE Deposits:Sandy Hook, Coney Island, and Rockaway Beach are pronounced coastal irregularities. South Beach and Midland Beach, Staten Island, are less so. These features are temporary for they represent initial stages in the process of coastal simplifica- tion. After the initial reefs and barriers have become land, the lagoons behind them are likely to be filled with sediment and organic matter, forming land.
The development of curved spits and beaches along the New Jersey and Long Island shores is worthy of consideration. In the vicinity of Long Branch, New Jersey, the sea cliff indicates wave erosion. The eroded débris is shifted northward by the waves and currents and piled up along the beach which terminates in Sandy Hook. The tend- ency of the hook to turn westward is due largely to the strong westward sweep of the winds and tides of the Atlantic Ocean. ‘This has been going on for some time, for Sandy Hook is a compound, recurved spit. Rockaway Beach is also compound in appearance while Coney Island is simple. The same forces which drift the sediments north along the New Jersey shore are moving them westward along the Long Island coast in the vicinity of Rockaway and Coney Island. As Staten Island lies across the path of these waves, South Beach and Midland Beach represent a barrier or bar which has been built up by the waves near the line of breakers. That the prevailing direction of currents along the Midland Beach is to the southwest is indicated by the development of a spit in the vicinity of Great Kills. Beach deposition and
straightening of the coast line is also in progress on the south shore of the Lower Bay in the vicinity of Port Monmouth, New Jersey.
The estuaries and lagoons east of Port Monmouth are being filled with sedi- ments derived from the land and the growth of vegetation, for, being in the lee of Sandy Hook and the barrier beaches, they are protected from strong sea waves. This is also true of Jamaica Bay, the Flushing Creek basin, Hackensack Meadows, Newark Bay, and the upper reaches of Arthur Kill. These bays and estuaries are the result of recent sub- sidence of the area. Thus the drowned lands, which now represent shallow sea floors, have been a factor in the placing and development of certain pronounced hooks and barrier beaches. The wind has also notably modified the deposits made by the waves and currents, for it has developed long ridges and sand dunes on the surface of the beaches.
In addition to the shore deposits which are of recent development there are rocks exposed in the New York district which have greater age and a more pro- found history. There are at least five series of them. While they are in close juxtaposition and have a_ well- established relation to each other, they are widely separated in origin by great intervals of time. Each series has had its normal period of development; the oldest, however, has suffered greater physical and chemical changes imposed upon it by mountain-making movements and other deformations which have affected it during the growth of the North American continent.
In passing from a consideration of the present shore developments to the oldest series of rocks exposed in the area we go rapidly backward from the Age of Man through the Age of Mammals, the Age of Reptiles, the Age of Amphibians, the Age of Fishes, the Age of Inverte- brates, to the little-known but inferred Age of Unicellular Organisms. We shall not take the opportunity to note the
GEOLOGY OF NEW YORK
ever-changing shore line, the configur- ation of the lands and seas, and the great accumulation of sediments which have taken place slowly and repeatedly during these ages. We shall have to omit a discussion of the birth, rise, decay, and disappearance of mountain ranges which have succeeded one another in this and other parts of the continent. Standing on the threshold of the better known eras of geologic time, beginning with the Archeozoic, and turning our back on the hypothetical zeons through which the earth must have already passed, let us approach the Present from the chrono- logical point of view.
Tue ArcH#o0zorc ERA: In the dawn of life a series of limestones and associ- ated sedimentary rocks were laid down in Canada near Ottawa, which have been called the Grenville series. According to Professor Berkey, of Columbia Uni- versity, certain metamorphosed rocks in the Manhattan and Reading prongs of the New England upland are contempo- raneous inage. The Fordham gneiss ex- posed in the Bronx and Westchester counties and northward has all the physical characters of the Grenville series. It consists primarily of granitic and quartzose black and white banded gneisses and schists of very complex composition and _ structure. Inter- bedded quartzite and limestones and old igneous intrusions are also included. Note the position on the accompanying geologic map, pp. 436-437.
Overlying the gneiss series in a con- formable manner at certain localities is the Lowerre quartzite named after the locality in South Yonkers from which it was first described. It is a_ thin, schistose quartzite which varies in thick- ness from a fraction of a foot to 100 feet and rarely out-crops.
This formation is followed by a coarsely crystalline limestone locally tremolitic, micaceous, and pegmatitic, which varies in thickness from 200 to 800 feet. It is called the Inwood dolomite after the Inwood section of the
Civ AND TTS VICINITY 9
city at the north end of Manhattan Island. Good exposures of the Inwood dolomite occur in the valley north of Dyckman Street, for instance at Marble Hill station on the New York Central Railroad.
Conformable and overlying the In- wood formation is a coarsely crystalline mica schist, very thick, and pegmatitic, which is called the Manhattan after the extensive exposures on Manhattan Island. The Lowerre-Inwood-Manhat- tan series is regarded as late Grenville in age. This and the Fordham series con- stitute the originally sedimentary beds of the Archeozoic Era exposed in the New York City district.
THE PRoTEeRozoic Era, IGNEOUS Rocks: All igneous rocks of the crystal- line area under consideration are younger than the sedimentary members since they have been intruded. But they are not all of the same age or kind. There are granitic stringers and sills which may date back to the close of the earliest of these sedimentary periods, since they partake of all the metamorphic changes that characterize these ancient strata including recrystallization and flowage. The most striking examples are the Yonkers granite gneiss, a sill, and the Ravenswood granodiorite, a boss. Some of the pegmatite streaks and basic intrusions belong to a period of more extensive metamorphic activity and penetrate the Inwood dolomite and Manhattan schist. Examples are the Harrison diorite, basic dikes, granitic dikes, bosses, and intrusions as shown on the accompanying geologic map, pp. 436-437. Serpentine, which is a meta- morphic alteration product, has a like origin and distribution.
The entire basal series of rocks have been folded, crumpled, faulted, crushed, injected, intruded, and intensely modi- fied by recrystallization, nevertheless, they retain the fundamental association and essential character of an originally sedimentaryseries. Manyof the gneisses, a few of the schists, al! of the granites
Slab showing passage of two Triassic dinosaurs after a shower. The raindrop impressions are represented by small pits. After R. S. Lull
Impressions of the feet and tail of a Triassic dinosaur on a ripple-marked surface. Speci- men from Pleasantdale, New Jersey
10
GEOLOGY OF NEW YORK CITY AND ITS VICINITY II
STEGOMUS
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ANOMOEPUS
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RHYTIDODON
Certain types of dinosaurs of Triassic age which inhabited the New York, Virginia, and Con-
necticut valley basins
and diorites are of igneous origin and occur as sills, dikes, or bosses, cutting the metamorphosed sedimentary members. They, too, have been greatly metamor- phosed and are very ancient, perhaps late Archeozoic or Proterozoic.
Tue PaLt#ozoic Era: The Paleozoic rocks and fossils, which represent a tremendously long period of time and follow the Proterozoic Era, are not found in the immediate vicinity of New York City. They appear, however, in great force in western New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and the Mississippi valley states.
THE Mesozotc ERA, Triassic PE- R10D: From the Hudson River west- ward to the crystalline rocks of the New Jersey highlands occur a thick series of reddish brown sandstones, shales, and conglomerates, called the Newark group, which dip ro to 15 degrees to the north- west. Near Philadelphia, Trenton, and New Brunswick, the Stockton, Locatong, and Brunswick formations have been differentiated, but not beneath the glacial drift cover to the northeastward. These sedimentary rocks were deposited in a
trough or graben with faulted margins which extended southwestward from the Hudson River across central New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland into southern Virginia. In all prob- ability a major stream with lateral tribu- taries occupied the depression. The region was presumably high and arid. Ripple marks, mud cracks, rain drop impressions, and footprints of reptiles are common, especially in the Brunswick shale, and indicate flood plain and shal- low water deposition. Restorations of the dinosaurs, Stegomus, Anomoepus. Podo- kesaurus, Anchisaurus, and Rutiodon (Rhytidodon), which inhabited this zone and the Connecticut Valley, are shown in accompanying illustrations, pp. 441-42- 43. Only one skeleton, the Fort Lee Rutiodon, pp. 442-43, has been found near New York City. Fossil fishes and a small crustacean, Estheria ovata, have also been found. The fossil remains