"Why, of course!" called Edgarton, a bit impatiently, from the window.

Laboriously Barton went back and reread the phrase to himself.
"Oh--oh, yes," he conceded lamely.

"Paleontologically,"

he began all over again. "Oh, dear, no!" he interrupted himself. "I
was farther along than that!--Absence of marine saurians? Oh, yes!

"Absence of marine saurians,"

he resumed glibly,

"Dinosaurs and Pterosaurs--so abundant in the--in the
Cretaceous--of Ammonites and Belemnites,"

he persisted--heroically. Hesitatingly, stumblingly, without a glimmer
of understanding, his bewildered mind worried on and on, its entire
mental energy concentrated on the single purpose of trying to
pronounce the awful words.

"Of Rudistes, Inocerami--Tri--Trigonias,"

the horrible paragraph tortured on ...

"By the marked reduction in the--Brachiopods compared
with the now richly developed Gasteropods and--and
sinupalliate--Lamellibranchs,"--