50 Background of Work and Study in Public Health 



tions and elemental composition had been advanced here before 

 gatherings of scientists; but the necessary emphasis of the science 

 was still on the minerals and wealth-producing resources. In a 

 few words, geology was still largely mineralogy. Zoologists had 

 still before them the task of completing their initial systematic 

 arrangements of the American fossil discoveries of vertebrate. and 

 invertebrate life. Belief in man's antiquity was asserted, *^^ but final 

 proof for the view had not yet been established. In 1869 Joseph 

 Leidy's monograph on the "Extinct Mammalian Fauna of Ne- 

 braska and Dakota" had appeared, and during the next decades 

 studies by Edward Drinker Cope*^- and Othniel Charles Marsh 

 would increase knowledge of the life histories of many forms of 

 fossil vertebrates. Among the more interesting of the discoveries 

 were toothed birds and horses, and in some of the work Darwin 

 found the best proof of evolution to appear in twenty years. ''^ 



Entomology, too, was primarily taxonomic. John Lawrence 

 LeConte,'^^ " the greatest of American entomologists," devoted his 

 life especially to systematic work. Investigating " as far as prac- 

 ticable " life histories of the Coleoptera and other groups of 

 insects, he defined more than 1,100 of the higher groups, and 

 formed nearly 250 synoptic or analytic tables. Before his death in 

 1883, he had described " for the first time " half of the Coleoptera 

 of the United States. 



Most of the early important classification studies made by 

 Charles Leo Lesquereux on the paleobotany of North America 

 appeared during the 1870's and 1880's. 



In the physical sciences, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc., 

 large segments of study represented more the work of analysis 

 than synthesis. It is of interest to learn that not until almost the 

 middle of the nineteenth century were the first American volume 

 of astronomical observations and first catalogue of stars 

 published.'' 



" Idetn, 10. 



°" Marcus Benjamin, Edward Drinker Cope, Leading American tnen of science 

 ed. by David Starr Jordan, 313-340, N. Y., Henry Holt and Co., 1910. 



^•'George Bird Grinnell, Othniel Charles Marsh, ibid., 283-312 at p. 301. 



^* Samuel H. Scudder, John Lawrence Le Conte, Biog. Memoirs Nat'l Acad. Sci. 

 2: 261-293, 1886; A hist, of the first half-century of the Nat'l Acad, of Sci., 157, 

 Washington, 1913. 



"'B. A. Gould, James Melville Gilliss, C/V?,?. Mem. Nat'l Acad. Sci. 1: 135-179, 

 1877; A hist, of the first half-cent, of Nat'l Acad., op. cit., 136. 



