SKETCH OF SAMUEL LOCKWOOD. 695 



ancient flora. He extracted from the face of the cliff a bell- 

 shaped stone, the lower part of which was more than three feet in 

 diameter and the upper surface about two feet. It was the base 

 of a shaft of a huge tree fern. 



In 1854 Mr. Lock wood was called from Gilboa to Key port, 

 N. J., and he took with him a careful drawing of the big fossil. 

 About two years afterward he revisited his haunts in the Scho- 

 harie Valley, when with other large fossils he removed the one 

 just described, and presented it to Rutgers College. The moving 

 of this mass some thirteen hundred pounds over thirty- seven 

 miles of the Catskills was not without incidents. The young 

 student was much annoyed, at points where the horses were 

 fed, by inquiries about the "big stun." His paleontological 

 lecture upon the rock as being the base of a wonderful plant 

 rather puzzled the country people, as at Durham, N, Y., where 

 the most rational theory that could be conceived to account for 

 his proceedings was that the rock contained gold. This theory 

 won respect for the geologist, who was now viewed in the light 

 of a mining explorer. 



Mr. Lockwood prepared drawings of his fossil plants, intend- 

 ing to send them to Hugh Miller, when the news came of the 

 Scotch geologist's death. The fossils were studied and described 

 by Sir J. William Dawson, of Montreal, and the descriptions with 

 plates were published. The chief fossil received the name Cau- 

 lopteris Lockwoodi, meaning Lockwood's " wing-shafted " tree 

 fern. Each stem was a symmetrical column of sixty feet in 

 height, with vast fronds like far outreaching wings. 



Upon invitation of the late Prof. George H. Cook, then the 

 New Jersey State Geologist, Mr. Lockwood presented the fossil 

 to Rutgers College, with a speech, at a meeting of the Students' 

 Natural History Society, in commencement week. 



Mr. Lockwood reasoned out, without aid from books, to the 

 conclusion that, though resembling the Carboniferous fossils, these 

 Devonian plants must have antedated them ; and that, though the 

 rocks containing them were superficial in the Catskills, they prob- 

 ably extended, in Pennsylvania, beneath the coal beds. His in- 

 terest in geology became from this time very lively. 



In his new field in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Mr. Lock- 

 wood's attention was directed to the Cretaceous deposits known 

 as the marl beds. They exhibited a new phase of organic re- 

 mains in their vertebrate fossils, attesting to the former pres- 

 ence in the region of a race of immense reptiles quite as wonder- 

 ful in their way as the Devonian cryptogams of the Catskills. 

 During one of the visits of inspection which he was in the habit 

 of making to the clay bluffs near Keyport, he observed what 

 appeared to be the surface of a broken bone, black and friable. 



