Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/310

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306
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

abundantly illustrated, describing new discoveries and supporting and elaborating his stratigraphic and phylogenetic views.

His untimely death in August, 1911, is stated to have been due to blood poisoning from a neglected wound.

Through the courtesy of Professor W. B. Scott and Dr. W. J. Sinclair I am enabled to illustrate this notice with a portrait of Dr. Ameghino, and with views of the shop which supplied the funds for his explorations and the little workshop and study where his collections were installed and the greater part of his monumental researches were

Fig. 3. Ameghino's Workshop and Study at the Back of His Stationery Store in La Plata.
Courtesy of Professor W. B. Scott.
Packing cases stacked against the walls and in every available space served to accommodate the boxes of fossils, and rough deal tables to lay them out for examination and study.

carried on. There is something peculiarly affecting and inspiring in the picture of this great paleontologist, maintaining through all these years of straitened circumstance a record of splendid achievement, in a field which beyond most others is supposed to require ample means in order to accomplish much that is worth while. For the most conservative of paleontologists will accord to him a record of accomplished work equalled by few of his confreres in amount and importance.

Time will show how much of Ameghino's contribution to paleontologic theory will stand. But, right or wrong, his challenging of many accepted views has compelled a reconsideration and more careful sifting of the evidence upon which they are based, which can not but be bene-