INTRODUCTION 



Brachiopods have interested the senior author since the days of his early youth, and by 1886, 

 while assistant to E. O. Ulrich in Cincinnati, he had a private collection of them so large and well 

 arranged that it led James Hall to transport collection and collector to Albany to assist him in the 

 work then in preparation, "An Introduction to the Study of the Genera of Palasozoic Brachiopoda" 

 (1892-1894). This recognition stimulated Schuchert all the more to add to his collection, which 

 he has continued to do ever since, with the exception of the twelve years spent as curator at the 

 United States National Museum, where each official is expected to devote his entire attention to the 

 care and increase of the Government collections. The first great addition was made in 1884, when 

 the brachiopods gathered by E. O. Ulrich were obtained, and later through purchase came the Ernst 

 H. V'aupel and other smaller collections from the Ohio Valley. At Albany was purchased the John 

 M. Clarke collection of Middle Devonian fossils. All the non-brachiopod material in these pur- 

 chases was exchanged with the dealers Braun of New York and Krantz of Bonn, Germany, for 

 European brachiopods, with the permission of the authorities of the National Museum. 



Upon taking up the chair of paleontology at Yale University in 1904, the stimulus to acquire 

 more brachiopods was renewed. The Marshall collection of English Jurassic Telotremata was pur- 

 chased in 1909 through S. S. Buckman, who relabeled the material carefully, especially with regard 

 to stratigraphic horizons; and later the private collection of Fred Braun of New York, also rich in 

 European species, which that dealer had long been accumulating. Largest of all the acquisitions, 

 however, enriching the Schuchert Collection by many thousands of fine Paleozoic specimens, was the 

 private collection of D. K. Greger, most of which that devoted gatherer of brachiopods had assem- 

 bled, during a long life, from the Mississippi Valley and the Southwest. With this material came 

 an extensive library of brachiopod literature, which, together with that already in the Peabody 

 Museum, forms the still growing Schuchert-Greger Brachiopod Library of that institution. 



From these statements it is apparent that the authors of the present work had access to one of 

 the largest brachiopod collections known. For Cambrian material, without which no genetic study 

 of brachiopod genera can have a secure foundation, we had the privilege of access to the most exten- 

 sive collections known from rocks of this period, made by Charles D. Walcott and forming one of 

 the great treasures of the United States National Museum. 



At Washington the curatorial duties of the senior author made it impossible to take up any 

 protracted paleontological studies, due to the rapid growth and constant need for rearrangement of 

 the National Museum collections; but he did bring to final form a card catalogue of brachiopod 

 genera and species which he had begun at Cincinnati, and which appeared in print in 1897 as Bulle- 

 tin 87 of the United States Geological Survey. With his transfer to Yale, the hope of working up 

 his collections was reborn, but here again, due to university and administrative duties, it soon became 

 evident that if anything worth while was to be done, it must come through a colleague who could 

 devote his entire time to a restudy of the genera. For many years, however, neither adequate 

 scholarships nor museum appointments could be found, but, with the hope still in mind, the senior 

 author laid aside savings out of his salary and out of royalties accruing from the sale of his text- 

 books. Finally, in 1925, there came to Yale a post-graduate student, the junior author, who soon 

 showed that he possessed the necessary qualifications and inclination to undertake the work. 



In the beginning privat-dozent and professor emeritus built "castles in Spain," contemplating a 

 revision of all the brachiopod genera, but caution led them to start with the most primitive of the 

 articulate forms, the orthoids. What an undertaking the original intention would have been is seen 

 in Schuchert and LeVene's "Generum et Genotyporum Index et Bibliographia" of 1929, which lists 

 about 700 valid genera, of which 456 are Paleozoic, 177 Mesozoic, and 74 Cenozoic-Recent. 



The senior author had also become suspicious that all was not correct in regard to the origin of 

 the Telotremata as held by Beecher (1891) and Schuchert (1897), and in regard to the supposed 

 primordial significance of the deltidium in the Protremata, and of what had been called the pro- 



