﻿6 INTRODUCTORY. 



number of photographs had, however, been sent by Tyson to various geologists in 

 this country and in Europe. Two specimens of Cycadeoidea marylandica belonging 

 to the original series are now in the Yale collection, having been presented by Tyson 

 to Professor Marsh in 1867. 



Not until 1889, however, were several of the original Tyson specimens belong- 

 ing to the museum of the Maryland Academy of Natural Science described on the 

 basis of their macroscopic features and fully illustrated by Fontaine (54). Further 

 details concerning what is known of the locality and collection of these trunks are 

 given by Ward (172, 174). But no further trunks were obtained from Maryland for 

 thirty-three years. Then, in 1893, Mr. Arthur Bibbins, of the Woman's College of 

 Baltimore, obtained from various people of the countryside between Baltimore and 

 Washington no less than sixty specimens, which had been unsuspectedly sequestered 

 from time to time during the preceding hundred years. This valuable collection is 

 now in the museum of the Woman's College of Baltimore. The people who had 

 kept these trunks, with a careless or a semisuperstitious interest, had variously 

 regarded them as "beehives," "wasps' nests," "corals," "mushrooms," "beefmaw 

 stones " (referring to the reticulum of the ruminant stomach), and barnacles, thus 

 curiously recalling the Italian " barnacles " of Monti (see infra). The decayed sum- 

 mits of the somewhat crushed cycadean trunks of the Purbeck beds of the Isle of 

 Portland — I shall mention here, by way of diversion — are called "crows' nests" by 

 the English quarrymen; and the magnificent branching specimens from the Black 

 Hills, described in the present volume, were called by the ranchmen "cacti," from 

 the small groups of " melon cactus " which grow here and there on the hillsides 

 hard by where these beautiful fossil trunks weathered out. Being too heavy to be 

 readily removed, many good specimens were broken through idle curiosity, and 

 various important branching trunks were scattered, lost, or destroyed. 



The investigation of the several collections from the Maryland locality, so far 

 as macroscopic features can suffice, has been mainly made by Prof. Lester F. Ward. 

 The types established by 7 him are distributed as follows : 



Cycadeoidea marylandica (Fontaine), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 



C. Uhleri, Museum of the Maryland Academy of Natural Scieuces, Baltimore. 



C. Tysoniana, C. McGeeana, C. Fontaineana, C. Goucheriana, and C. Bibbinsi 

 (all Ward's species, 174), are, with various cotypes, in the museum of the Woman's 

 College of Baltimore. These types are numbered 1472, 1471, 1467, 1479, an d !427> 

 respectively. 



ISOLATED OR LITTLE-KNOWN LOCALITIES. 



The finding of "a trunk of a cycad" in the Trias of North Carolina, by 

 Emmons, in 1857, as figured in his Americau Geology (45), scarcely deserves to 

 rank as the first discovery of cycads in America. This type or a similar impression 

 of a trunk was found in the museum of Williams College several years since, and 

 later figured by Ward (178) ; but the original locality is now lost. 



During the thirty years following the discovery of fossil cycads in Maryland 

 only four specimens were obtained from other widely separated and isolated North 

 American localities. They are as follows: 



