The Common School from Scott City, Kansas • 3

death while feeding from the carcasa of the elephant," a the discoverer aid. As the hairy elephant lived at v. time when man himself Inhabited these regions so must have these tigers also. What a royal hunting ground Kansas must have been in those days. Of the various kinds of extinct deer, sheep, antelopes, monkeys, horses and camels, and many other strange animals whose are mingled in this ancient grave yard, the limits of this article will not permit a bare mention even.

Of but one other kind I will speak. The dog family, the Canidte of naturalists, are scattered all over the world at the present time, from Australia to Greenland and Patagonia. Foxes, dogs and wolves are abundant everywhere, the scavengers and sneak-thieves as well as the affectionate companions of men. The earliest dogs of Kansas were very different from those now living, the wolves and foxes. One species found in Phillips and other counties of the state was of very large size, larger than the.

largest Bernard and resembled in so many respects the living hyaenas, that naturalists are not quite sure that it belongs to the dog family. It must have been exceedingly ugly and ferocious, and possessed of a very low intelligence. Smallor dogs are not rare in the geological history of Kansas, but the most interesting of all is our grey wolf, which enjoys the distinction of being the oldest mammal in America. In the University of Kansas Museum there is a fossil skull of a grey wolf taken from many feet below the surface in the western part of the state. He was undoubtedly a companion with the hairy elephant and sabre-toothed tiger as well as primitive man, whom he preceded.

The sneaking coyote can lay claim to no such aristocratic lineage, as he is not known at all in the fossil state. Ten kinds of extinct horses, six kinds of camels and llamas and as many of bisons and oxen have been discovered in Kansas. In a future article the writer will give some of the known facts concerning their history. S. w.

Willis-ton." county, among the- earliest of their race known, were smaller than the living elephant, and differed very remarkably from the later mastodons and elephants in having two pairs of tusks, one pair from the upper and the other pair from the lower jaws. Not less than six other species of four tusked mastodons are known from Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and Florida. Altogether we know from America perhaps twenty species of the elephant family, some of them living within very recent times. Within the time of man, even four or five of the large species, both mastodons and elephants are known from Kansas. The two most common forms in Kansas, the mastodon and the hairy elephant, were each about twelve feet high, that is nearly two feet higher than Jumbo, the famous giant elephant was, and about twenty feet long to the ends of the tusks.

A deposit of the hairy elephant bones was found a few years ago in Rush county in the valley of the Smoky Hill river. It was in a small space, not twenty feet square, yet it yielded portions of more than one hundred animals. The spot had probably been some old spring and bog, where the animals had come for water and died. The hairy elephant, whose remains are the most common of all in Kansas, has lived so recently in the arctic regions that their bodies have been preserved complete, frozen in ice, the flesh and skin unde-composed. For many years thousands of dollars worth of their fossil tusks were sold annually in the ivory market of London.

In Alaska their bones are said to be very abundant. The original home of the elephant and mastodon was America. Many of them migrated to Europe and Asia when the rhinoceroses did, but others remained for a much longer time in both North and South America, long after the time when man himself inhabited these regions. With these rhinoceroses and mastodons have been found in the Long Island "bone bed" the remains of several species of the cat family, one of them the largest ever known to exist. This species measured when alive not less than thirteen feet in length, and must have been a fourth larger than the royal Bengal tiger, the largest animal of the cat kind now in existence.

It differed very remarkably from all the living cats in having two enormous canine teeth, fully six inches in length, which protruded so far below the lower jaws that it was difficult for the animal to open its mouth wide enough to permit anything to pass them. These immense teeth were sabre-like in form, with a sharp serrated edge in front and behind, and were undoubtedly murderous weapons for piercing and cutting. In the Long Island deposits there have been found remains of four other cats, none of them smaller than the mountain lion, and all probably with these sabre-like teeth. More recently the remains of an animal of this kind have been discovered in the Indian Territory jus south of Kansas, mingled with the remains of a hairy elephant, "as thougl the animal had been overcome wit! OPINIONS. Hy Win, Stryker, State Superintendent.

When a school lias boon dismissed by the district board on account of contagious disease, the teacher is not entitled to pay for the time the school has been dismissed, but under con tract may teach the entire time and receive pay. Under the law it is the duty of the county superintendent to see that school is maintained in every district in his county where there are children of school age, or that the children are sent to school in adjoining districts. It requires the joint action of the district board, acting as a board and not individually, with the county superintendent to dismiss a teacher. The decision of the county superintendent and district board is final. If the teacher and board of education require rhetorical exercises of the pupils, such requirement can be enforced.

A school district treasurer should not pay an order until after it has been properly signed by the director of the board. A board of education can not purchase and pay for school books from district funds without a vote of the district ordering them to do so. A school board can not be compelled to open the school house for religions purposes. When the surety on the bond of a school district treasurer desires to be relieved from further responsibility upon the treasurer's bond, he should serve written notice to that effect upon the district board and request the board to relieve him from further responsibility. When this is done it is the duty to relieve the party and require new bond.

A school board has no right under the law to purchase charts or any supplies of that character without a vote of the district. Any warrants given by the board for such a purchase are worthless. The law gives county superintendents the right to change school district boundaries as he may see fit. Before he can do so lie must give twenty days notice, posted in five different places in Ihe districts proposed to be changed. A school district board has no legal right to employ a teacher before the annual school meeting.

A Prehistoric Kansas Bone Deposit. About six miles south of Long Island, Phillips county, in the northwestern part of Kansas, there was discovered about twelve years ago, a deposit of fossil bones of extraordinary extent. The bones lie scattered about very thickly in a stratum of sand of two or three feet in thickness. How extensive this stratum is has not yet been determined, since the most of it lies under many feet thickness of rocks and sand. In all probability, however, judging from the fragments of bones in the vicinity, it must cover at least one or two hundred acres of ground.

Fossils have been collected here for many scientific museums in this country and in Europe. The National Museum alone has more than fifty tons of them and certainly as many more have found their way into other museums. How such an enormous mass of animal remains, representing thousands if not millions of different indi. viduals ever accumulated in this place, is not difficult to explain. During recent geological times, that is to say within the last forty or fifty thousand years, the regions where the bones now are, was the bottom of a shallow, inland lake of considerable extent, with Bandy bottom and shores.

Most of the animals whose remains are found here were such as lived in marshy regions; others frequented the region to prey upon the animals that came here for water or that lived in the water. Dying, or killed in their sanguinary encounters, their bones were washed about by the waves until they had been covered beneath the shifting sands, to there remain unchanged through all these thousand years. Bones like those found in this deposit are not rare over all the western part of Kansas, but nowhere are they found heaped together in such enormous quantities. Probably four-fifths of all the bones are those of two species of Rhinoceroses, which, from the extraordinary abundance of their remains, must have existed in Kansas once in vast numbers. A skeleton of one of these animals from this bone deposit has been restored complete and mounted in the University of Kansas Museum.

It stands four feet and a half high and nine feet long. The legs are short, and the body enormous, with a girth of over nine feet, the belly reaching nearly to the ground. The head was without horns, as was the case with all the early Rhinoceroses. Another species, much less common than this short-legged one, stood a full foot taller and was more slender in all its proportions. These Rhinoceroses were the last of their race in America.

It is a remarkable fact that America was the original home of the Rhinoceros, as it was also of the elephant, the horse, and the camel, all of which lived together in Kansas. For many thousand years prior to the time when this "bone bed" was formed, at least twenty species of Rhinoceroses had lived and become extinct in America; and even earlier than they, smaller animals that were the primitive stock from which the Rhinoceros was derived had lived in this country. In the Bad Lands of South Dakota, the dried up mud of an ancient lake, not less than a dozen species of Rhinoceroses have been discovered, some of them much larger than any that have since lived. Not many thousand yearH ago, there was a land connection through the North Atlantic ocean between the eastern and the western continents, over which many animals, and plants even, passed between the continents. It was in this way that the Rhinoceros, as well as the other animals mentioned above, reached Europe and thence Africa and Asia, and left no descendants here.

There are living at the present time seven species of Rhinoceroses, all of them with one or two horns on the front part of the head, except the female of one species, which has none. Next in abundance in these bone beds are the remains of an early mastodon. The mastodon is an animal very much like the living elephant; so much alike, in fact, that none except a special student can tell the bones of the two animals apart, when he does not have the teeth, which aro the most characteristic parts of the skeleton. These early mastodons of Phillips Reader in Operation Easy. Constructed Conscientiously.

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U. t. A. Catalogues and Information, Kansas City Branch, 113 W. oth St.

Have You Attended The Wesleyan Business College? Of course not. or you would not be teaching public school for a living. Those who take a thorough Business or Shorthand Course at the Kansas Wesleyan 4 are guaranteed better wages than they can get teaching school. This college maintains the most complete course of study, the best equipments, and the ablest instructors in penmanship, shorthand and boos-keepine found west of the Mississippi. For particulars write for journal.

Address T. W. ROACH, General Superintendent. Sallna, Kansas..