124 Rhodora [J> NE 



the local history and the customs, and especially the language of 

 the Indians. Two items on the brief list of his publications are de- 

 voted to this subject. Doubtless this interest led to his appoint- 

 ment as one of the committee in charge of the celebration of the bi- 

 centennial anniversary of the settlement of Middletown in 1850. 



But his scientific interests seem never to have been quite forgotten. 

 In 1835 we hear of him as in charge of a class in botany at Wesley an 

 University, then recently started, and as one of the founders and 

 the president of a college scientific society. In 1836 he wanted to 

 give up practice and go as naturalist with the Wilkes exploring ex- 

 pedition and applied for the place in competition with Asa Gray. 

 He kept meteorological records, investigated the dates of late and 

 early frosts and the length of the growing season, and the effect of 

 rain-fall at the flowering time of fruit trees on the subsequent crop. 

 He made observations on the spring floods of the Connecticut River 

 and suggested a method of measuring their height very similar to 

 that now in use. He studied the rocks of the region and planned to 

 compile a catalogue of minerals occurring in them. The local papers 

 contain letters from him on all these subjects — as frequent, one sus- 

 pects, as the editors would allow. 



His final, and fatal, interest was in geology. He had the mis- 

 fortune — for him— to live at the edge of the triassic sandstone of 

 the Connecticut Valley and near quarries where, in the course of 

 their work, tracks of animals and other fossils, in which these rocks 

 are rich, were often uncovered. These things fired his imagination 

 — over-stimulated it, indeed. He began to see in them what no one 

 else could discern — vestiges of warm-blooded animals, ostriches 

 kangaroos 1 and the like; the impression of a hairy belly where some 

 quadruped had crouched; finally the foot-prints of man. It was a 

 special kind of man with four toes only and Barratt christened him 

 Homo tciradactylos. With little evidence but his own surmises to 

 go upon, he concluded that these rocks were not Triassic but Eocene 

 and that in that age, some millions of years earlier than other geolo- 

 gists would allow, man and warm-blooded animals had appeared to- 

 gether. From the seemingly insignificant circumstance that their 

 tracks were contiguous, he argued that Homo tdradactylos had domes- 

 ticated the monsters of his time and used them for his convenience, 



1 He remarks that large birds and kangaroos lived together then as now in Aus- 

 tralia. 



