e world peopled with ogres and dragons and
belonging to the unreal "once upon a time" which has no connection
with the ever present workaday world in which we live. Birds and
squirrels, rabbits and foxes belong to this real world because he has
seen them in his walks through the woods; even elephants and
rhinoceroses, though his acquaintance be limited to menagerie
specimens, seem fairly real--although one recalls the farmer's comment
on first seeing a giraffe in the Zoological park: "There aint no sich
animal." But dinosaurs--one easily realizes the state of mind that
prompts the inquiry so often made by visitors to the Dinosaur
Hall:--"they make these out of plaster, don't they?" So far as is
consistent with good taste, the aim of the American Museum has been
to enable the visitor to see for himself how much of plaster
reconstruction there is to each skeleton, and to explain in the labels
what the basis was for the reconstructed parts.

_How They are Found._ But to the collector these extinct animals are
real enough. As he journeys over the western plains he sees the
various living inhabitants thereof, birds and beasts, as well as men,
pursuing their various modes of life; here and there he comes across
the scattered skeletons or bones of modern animals lying strewn upon
the surface of the ground or half buried in the soil of a cut bank. In
the shales or sandstones that underlie the soil he finds the objects
of his search, skeletons or bones of extinct animals, similarly
disposed, but buried in rock instead of soft soil, and exposed in
canyons and gullies cut through the solid rock. Each rock formation, he
knows by precept and experience, carries its own peculiar fauna, its
animals are different from those of the formation above and from those
in the formation below. Days and weeks he may spend in fruitless
search following along the outcrop of the formation, through rugged
badlands, along steep canyon walls, around isolated points or buttes,
without finding more than a few fragments, but spurred on by vivid
interest and the rainbow prospect of some new or rare find. Finally
perhaps, after innumerable disappointments, a trail of fragments leads
up to a really promising prospect. A cautious investigation indicates
that an articulated skeleton is buried at this point, and that not
too much of it has "gone out" and rolled in weathered fragments down
the slope. For the tedious and delicate process of disinterring the
ske