216 PROFESSOR THOMAS CONDON. Marsh based his theory of the evolution of that animal. 1 In this instance Marsh gave the discoverer scant credit for his work, and the type-specimens remained in Yale Museum until after Marsh died. The same thing happened to many other valuable specimens loaned to Marsh, Cope, Gabb, and others. A fine lot of Pliocene birds from Southeastern Oregon, loaned to Cope, were never returned. It was doubtless to the interest of science that these fossils fell into the hands of other men, but it was unjust to Condon not to acknowledge more fully his services, and not to return his specimens. In 1867 Professor Condon printed in the Portland Oregonian an account of what he then thought to be the first fossil horses found in America, the same specimens that Marsh described several years later. What a strange contrast between these zealous, ambitious paleontologists, and that lonely, unselfish, but no less devoted worker in the wilderness of Oregon ! "Condon's best friend and occasional companion was Joseph Le Conte, who accompanied him on several trips, and who always gave him the fullest credit when publishing his ideas or observations. These two old lovers of earth-science recall a comparison made by Suess, 2 in writing of an almost unknown geologist, Arnold Escher von der Linth :
- 'On the one side stood Sir Charles, 3 the calm, superior
philosopher, the lucid thinker and able writer ; on the other, dear old Arnold Escher, who intrusted his admirable sketches and diaries to everyone indiscriminately, but to whom every line he had to publish was a torment, and who was perhaps only quite in his element up in the snow and ice, when the wind swept his gray head and his eye roamed over a sea of peaks.' "From a scientific standpoint Professor Condon's best con- tribution is doubtless his paper 4 on 'The Willamette Sound.' Condon showed that this Pleistocene body of water filled the Willamette Valley, and extended north to Puget Sound, with a probable length of about three hundred miles. He worked 1 Professor Henry F. Osborn has said: "I believe that Professor Condon deserves the entire credit of the discovery of the Upper Oligocene horses in the John Day." Pacific Monthly, November, 1906, p. 566. 2 Preface to Das Antlitz der Erde, translation by Hertha Sollas. 3 Sir Charles Lyell. 4 "The Willamette Sound," Overland Monthly, Vol. VII, No. 5, pp. 468-73. (San Francisco, 1871); Reprinted as a chapter in "The Two Islands."
