1 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Omaha village situated below the mouth of the Big Sioux river. A 

 short distance upstream from the last mentioned point he examined 

 strata which, by means of their fossils presumably, he refers to the 

 Chalk division of the Floetz, or Secondary, rocks of northern France 

 and southern England. This is the earliest definite recognition of beds 

 of Cretacic age in America. It preceded by a decade and a half the 

 separation, by John Finch, of the newer Secondary rocks from the 

 Tertiary section in the Atlantic states, and Lardner Vanuxem's and 

 Samuel Morton's references of the same deposits to the Cretaceous age. 

 Thus also was another great succession of one of our main geologic 

 periods discovered in a then remote part of our continent years before 

 it was recognized in the East. 



At the mouth of the Big Sioux river Nuttall fell in with an old 

 trapper who described to him the great falls which blocked navigation 

 at a distance of 100 miles up that stream, and who told him of the 

 famous Indian pipestone quarries beyond. 



The analogy established by Nuttall between the general Carbonic 

 section of Iowa and the upper Mississippi valley and that of northern 

 England was one of the important geologic discoveries in America. Its 

 great significance was pointed out by Owen a couple of decades later. 

 Its historical value grows with the advancing years. In the final recog- 

 nition of a standard Carbonic section for this continent the sequence 

 displayed in the Mississippi basin must prevail, since it is now generally 

 conceded that the Appalachian succession of strata can never be consid- 

 ered as the typical development. 



So conspicuously botanical in character are Nuttall's services to 

 science that one can but wonder under what circumstances he could 

 have obtained his keen insight into matters geological. Elias Durand 

 said of him immediately after his death that " No other explorer of the 

 botany of North America has personally made more discoveries; no 

 writer on American plants, except perhaps Asa Gray, has described more 

 new genera and species." Lists of his published memoirs and papers 

 quite generally omit all reference to his recorded geological observations, 

 probably because their importance could hardly be fully appreciated by 

 writers in other fields of science. In the present connection our main 

 interest centers on the transplanting so early to the interior of the 

 American continent of Williams Smith's novel ideas concerning fossils. 

 Brief reference to some of the early events in Nuttall's life seem to 

 offer a clue. 



Nuttall was born in Yorkshire, England, in the mountain limestone 

 belt, and near the scene of Martin's famous labors on the Carbonic 

 fossils of Derbyshire. He was early apprenticed to the printer's trade 

 and after a few years removed to London. There he followed his trade 

 until, at the age of 22, he set out for America, in 1808. He appears to 



