1854.] 69 



May 2d, 1854. 

 Vice-President Bridges in the Chair. 



A letter was read from the Portland (Maine) Society of Nat. History, 

 dated April 20th, 1854, acknowledging the receipt of an entire copy of 

 the Publications of the Academy, presented in accordance with a late 

 resolution. 



Also a letter from the American Philosophical Society, dated April 

 27, 1854, acknowledging the receipt of the last number of the Journal 

 and of the Proceedings. 



May 9 th. 

 Vice-President Bridges in the Chair. 



Dr Le Conte presented a paper for publication in the Proceedings, 

 entitled " Synopsis of the Cucuiides of the United States," which was 

 referred to Mr. Cassin, Dr. Zantzinger, and Dr. Rand. 



Dr. Le Conte exhibited a fragment of the jaw of a new Pachyderm 

 from the Tertiary of Virginia, 80 or 90 miles S. W. of Alexandria, and 

 characterised it as a new genus allied to Dicotyles. 



Mr. Wm. Parker Foulke asked the attention of the Academy to a Lecture by 

 Mr. Hugh Miller, recently republished in the United States, under the title, " The 

 Two Records, the Mosaic and the Geological ;" and made some remarks upon the 

 importance of maintaining a careful scrutiny of the logic of the natural sciences. 

 The cultivators of those sciences are particularly interested at this time in pre- 

 venting any misapprehension of the results of their researches, as there is a 

 prevailing disposition to " reconcile " these by extreme processes with the 

 popular interpretation of certain texts of the Mosaic history. Unfinished inves- 

 tigations of the students of nature are used as complete evidence ; and provisional 

 generalizations are employed as fixed premises, from which are drawn conclusions 

 very inconvenient to subsequent inquirers and writers. Thus both religion and 

 natural science are wronged. 



Mr. Miller teaches that in the attempt to reconcile the two "records," there 

 are only three periods to be accounted for by the geologist, viz., " the period of 

 plants, the period of great sea monsters and creeping things : and the period of 

 cattle and leasts of the field ;" that the first of these " periods " is represented by 

 the rocks grouped under the term palceozoic, and is distinguished from the secondary 

 and the tertiary, chiefly by its " gorgeous flora ;" and that " the geological evi- 

 dence is so complete as to be patent to all, that the first great period of organized 

 being was, as described in the Mosaic record, peculiarly a period of herbs and 

 trees yielding seed after their kind." The general reader, not familiar with the 

 details of geological arrangement, could not fail to infer from such a statement, 

 used for such a purpose, that the palaeozoic rocks are regarded by geologists as 

 forming one group, representative of one period which can properly be said to be 

 distinguished as a whole by its gorgeous flora ; and that it is properly so dis- 

 tinguished for the argument in question. It was familiar to the Academy as well 

 as to Mr. Miller, that from the carboniferous rocks downward (backward in order 

 of time) there have been discriminated a large number of periods differing one 

 from another in mineral and in organic remains; and that the proportion of the 

 carboniferous era to the whole series is small, whether we regard the thickness 

 of its deposits or its conjectural chronology. It is only of this carboniferous era, 

 the latest of this series, that the author's remarks could be true ; and even of this, 

 if taken for the entire surface of the earth, it could not be truly asserted that 



PROCEED. ACAD. NAT. SCI. OF PHILADELPHIA, VOL. VII., HO. III. 7 



