Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/250

246 which they offer concerning the origin, evolution and world relationships of life in America, furnish very significant chapters in the history of the western side of the continent.

Nearly twenty years ago several very fragmentary specimens from the Mohave were forwarded to the writer by Dr. Stephen Bowers, the material having been obtained in part by John T. Reed. The earliest material from definitely known localities coming to the writer was received in the spring of 1911 from John E. Suman, then a student at the University of California. The collection consisted of a small quantity of loose bones and teeth obtained on the desert by H. S. Mourning. These specimens furnished the basis for the first study of the Upper Miocene fauna of the Mohave. In the following year C. L. Baker, a fellow in paleontology at the University of California, visited the localities reported by Mr. Mourning and secured a fine collection of mammal material from the Miocene near Barstow, and a small amount of material from the Pliocene at Ricardo. Other important collections were made later by Mr. Baker, Mr. Mourning, Mr. J. P. Buwalda and by many students in paleontology from the University of California. Following his work on the Mohave in 1913, Mr. Buwalda independently visited a locality in the eastern portion of this region, and obtained a most interesting collection of Pleistocene remains in a formation to which he has given the name Manix beds. This material gave us for the first time a representative group of vertebrates from the Pleistocene of the Great Basin.

The collections brought together at various times have opened to us a view of the mammalian life of the Mohave Desert in three periods: the Barstow fauna of Upper Miocene age, the Ricardo fauna of early Pliocene stage and the Manix fauna from the Pleistocene.

The Mohave Desert area of California has been generally recognized as one of the least attractive portions of the southwest. It has been described as a forbidding land of heat and thirst. The deception of its mirages is a current example of the lure of unreality, and its great stretches of sand and dust have appeared to function mainly as barriers to human progress. The history of exploration has seemed amply to justify current views concerning the desert, as year after year prospectors or explorers, deceived by distances or miscalculating the position of scattered water sources, have paid with their lives the penalty for inaccurate judgment.

In spite of seeming obstacles offered to one who would make its acquaintance, those who have come to know the Mohave seem always to cultivate the friendship. The prospector has cheerfully risked his life.