1869.] DAWSON — SCIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES. 5 



year a large corps of trained men into the higher practical 

 pursuits connected with science, but also an important centre of 

 discovery and original investigation, further materials for which 

 are being constantly accumulated. More especially in geology, 

 mineralogy, palaeontology, zoology and chemistry, are such men as 

 Dana, Silliman, Marsh, Brush and Verrill adding to the stock of 

 knowledge for the whole world, as well as training their students. 

 And this one of the results in all cases of a well appointed and 

 efficient school of science. 



Crossing the dark harbour of New York, cumbered with 

 cakes of ice ; and rapidly rolling over flat New Jersey, interest- 

 ing for its curious deposits of the green-sand of the old Cretaceous 

 Sea, now quarried as a manure, and to be seen in heaps green 

 almost as grass, by the roadside, we reach pleasant, quiet Phila- 

 delphia, in which among chief objects of interest to a scientific 

 traveller, are the collections of its old and useful Academy of 

 Sciences, a scientific workshop as vigorous in its age as any of its 

 more youthful rivals, though sadly in want of enlarged apart- 

 ments for its collections. Hawkins had just been setting up here 

 the skeleton of the Hadrosaurus of the New Jersey green-sand, one 

 of the most portentous of those old reptiles of that Mesozoic 

 age, when the giant " tanninim" were the lords of creation. It 

 must have been a creature four-fifths reptile and the rest bird, 

 standing upright twenty feet in height, on two enormous legs 

 with three-toed feet, and an immense pillar-like tail, while its 

 small fore feet were used as hands to aid it in obtaining the 

 fruits or other vegetable substances on which it fed. It might 

 be described as a gigantic reptilian kangaroo with the toes of 

 a bird ; and were it not for the actual bones proving that it had 

 existed, a zoologist would scarcely have the hardihood to 

 imagine such a creature in his dreams. We stand amazed 

 beside the skeleton of the Mastodon or the Megatherium, but 

 not with the feeling almost of disbelief in our senses excited by 

 the strange combination of characters in this wonderful animal, 

 which among other things shows how the apparent bird-tracks of the 

 Mesozoic rocks, or some of them, may have been made by biped 

 reptiles, strange and gigantic anticipations of the attitude of man 

 himself. As a companion, or rather a formidable enemy, to this 

 animal, Mr. Cope, who is studying these remains, showed me 

 portions of the skeleton of a gigantic carnivorous reptile of the 

 same age, with formidable teeth like those of Megalosaurus, and 



