It is a glorious thought to me that I have lived to see my wildest dreams come true, that I have seen stately halls rise to be graced with many of the animals of the past that lived in countless thousands, and that I have had the pleasure of securing some of the treasures, in the shape of complete skeletons, which now adorn those halls.
I stood on Columbia Heights that same year of 1906, and my heart swelled with pride when I looked down on that teeming metropolis and remembered that I too was a native of the Empire State. Then I thought of my distant prairie state of Kansas, and gloried in the thought that the best years of my life had been spent in her ancient ocean and lake beds, those old cemeteries of creation.
That past life, at least a very small fraction of it, I have sought to bring before my readers with pen pictures. We have men among us who can put their conceptions of the ancient inhabitants of land and sea and air on canvas, and among them are Mr. Charles R. Knight, of the American Museum, and Mr. Sidney Prentice, of the Carnegie Museum. Mr. Prentice I knew as a boy, and he has done me the honor to assure me that my words of counsel have done something at least toward assisting him to make the choice of following the work not only of an artist in a paleontological museum, but in portraying with pencil and brush the ideal pictures of the early denizens of earth as in life. His success is shown in his restorations of _Clidastes_. The results of Mr. Knight’s restorations of many of the extinct animals brighten my pages, thanks to my friend Professor Henry F. Osborn, so if I have failed in my pen pictures to take my readers into the misty past, these brilliant restorations will certainly have the desired effect.
I cannot hope in this short space to have given more than a passing glance at the life of a fossil hunter. It has been one of joy to me; I should not like to have missed making the discoveries I have made, and I would willingly undergo the same hardships to accomplish the same results. And if my story does anything to interest people in fossils, I shall feel that I have not written in vain.
When I requested Professor William K. Gregory of Columbia University to be the final reader of the manuscript of this book, “The Life of a Fossil Hunter,” shall I ever forget his kind words? “I hope you will not feel that you are under any personal obligations whatever, because this slight service is simply laid upon me by the necessities of the case, i. e., by the fact that your whole life and work have placed all paleontologists under lasting obligations to you.” Surely “my cup runneth over; I have a goodly heritage.” Greater than their obligations to me, are mine to the men of science who have described, published, but, above all, have prepared and exhibited the noble monuments of creative genius which I have been so fortunate as to discover and make known to the civilized world. My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure “to generations yet unborn.”