TIMOTHY ABBOTT CONRAD. 261 



all interest in every undertaking. " A period of moping would 

 usually end in his writing some verses which nobody would 

 praise, and this seemed sufficiently to nettle him, to rouse him 

 thoroughly, and he would become again enthusiastic in the mat- 

 ter of shells and fossils." 



In 1837 Conrad was appointed Geologist of the State of New 

 York, and after resigning the position remained as paleontologist 

 of the survey until 1842. " He prepared official reports on the 

 fossils collected by the United States exploring expedition under 

 Wilkes ; by Lieutenant Lynch's expedition to the Dead Sea ; by 

 the Mexican Boundary Survey, and some of the surveys for a rail- 

 road route to the Pacific undertaken under the supervision of the 

 War Department. Many papers were written by him on the 

 Tertiary and Cretaceous geology and paleontology of the east- 

 ern United States and published in the American Journal of Sci- 

 ence, the Bulletin of the National Institution, the American Jour- 

 nal of Conchology, Kerr's Geological Report on North America, 

 and other publications. A list of Conrad's papers, which covers 

 most of those bearing on paleontological topics, may be found in 

 Miscellaneous Publications of the United States Geological Sur- 

 vey of the Territories, No. 10 ; Bibliography of North American 

 Invertebrate Paleontology, by Drs. C. A. White and H. Alleyne 

 Nicholson Washington, Interior Department, 1878. It contains 

 a hundred and twelve titles" (Dall). 



In 1832 Conrad published Fossil Shells of the Tertiary Forma- 

 tions of North America. Illustrated by Figures drawn on Stone 

 from Nature. Vol. I. Philadelphia, 1832. It is dedicated to Sam- 

 uel George Morton, M. D. In 1838 Conrad published Fossils of 

 the Tertiary Formations of the United States. Illustrated by 

 Figures drawn from Nature. Philadelphia : J. Dobson. These 

 are known generally as the Eocene and Miocene volumes, and 

 both, as original editions, are extremejy rare. They have recent- 

 ly been reprinted in facsimile : the former by Mr. G. D. Harris 

 of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. ; and the lat- 

 ter by the Wagner Free Institute, under the editorial supervision 

 of William H. Dall, of the National Museum. In his introduc- 

 tion Prof. Dall says : " Students of the American Miocene and 

 the later Tertiary deposits of the New World are well aware of 

 the importance to them of Conrad's work, usually referred to by 

 the title of The Medial Tertiary. There can be little doubt that 

 the scarcity of this work and its predecessor, the Eocene volume, 

 is the chief cause of the delay in investigating our rich and inter- 

 esting Tertiary beds." 



Prof. Dall, in considering Conrad as a paleontologist, remark 

 as follows : " Mr. Conrad had several peculiarities ; he wrote his 

 letters and labels frequently on all sorts of scraps of paper, gen- 



