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The evidence we have, so far as it goes, tends to show that the South American fauna always has been more archaic in type than the arctogeal fauna of the same chronological level. To loose generalizations, and to elaborate misinterpretations of paleontological records, the kind of work done by Mr. Haseman furnishes an invaluable antiscorbutic.
There has been, for instance, a recent vogue for the extensive misuse, usually tautological misuse, of the word "complexus" an excellent word if used rarely and for definite purposes. Mr. Haseman drags it in continually when its use is either pointless and redundant or else serves purely to darken wisdom.
There is no better example of the kind of zoologist who does first- class field-work in the wilderness than John D. Haseman, who spent from 1907 to 1910 in painstaking and thorough scientific investigation over a large extent of South American territory hitherto only partially known or quite unexplored.
But as regards the less-known continents, such as South America, we sometimes fail to remember these obvious truths. There yet remains plenty of exploring work to be done in South America, as hard, as dangerous, and almost as important as any that has already been done; work such as has recently been done, or is now being done, by men and women such as Haseman, Farrabee, and Miss Snethlage.
There is, however, one serious criticism to be made on Haseman: the extreme obscurity of his style an obscurity mixed with occasional bits of scientific pedantry, which makes it difficult to tell whether or not on some points his thought is obscure also.
Mr. Haseman has such excellent thought that it is a pity to make it a work of irritating labor to find out just what the thought is. Surely, if he will take as much pains with his writing as he has with the far more difficult business of exploring and collecting, he will become able to express his thought clearly and forcefully.
Haseman and those whose bad example he in this instance follows use "complexus" in much the same spirit as that displayed by the famous old lady who derived religious instead of scientific consolation from the use of "the blessed word Mesopotamia." The reason that it is worth while to enter this protest against Mr. Haseman's style is because his work is of such real and marked value.
Haseman made his long journey with a very slender equipment, his extraordinarily successful field-work being due to his bodily health and vigor and his resourcefulness, self-reliance, and resolution. His writings are rendered valuable by his accuracy and common sense.
Haseman upholds with strong reasoning the theory that since the appearance of all but the lowest forms of life on this globe there have always been three great continental masses, sometimes solid sometimes broken, extending southward from the northern hemisphere, and from time to time connected in the north, but not in the middle regions or the south since the carboniferous epoch.
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