430 ■ Memorial of George Brown Goode. 



was an event of great importance. It was in 1804 that the author, a 

 schoohnaster near Philadelphia, decided upon his plan. In a le^tter to 

 Lawson he wrote: 



I am most earnestly bent on pursuing my plan of making a Collection of all the 

 Birds of North America. Now, I don't want you to throw cold water on this notice. 

 Quixotic as it may appear. I have been so long accustomed to the building of Airy 

 Castles and brain Windmills that it has become one of my comforts of life, a sort of 

 tough Bone, that amuses me when sated with the dull drudgery of Life. 



I need not eulogize Wilson. Everyone knows how well he succeeded. 

 He has had learned commentators and eloquent biographers. Our chil- 

 dren pore over the narrative of the adventurous life of the weaver natu- 

 ralist, and we all are sensible of the charms which his graceful pen has 

 given to the life histories of the birds. 



His poetical productions are immortal, and his lines to the Blue Bird 

 and the Fisherman's Hymn are worthy to stand by the side of Bryant's 

 Waterfowl, Trowbridge's Wood Pewee, Emerson's Titmouse, Thaxter's 

 Sandpiper, and, possibly best of all, Walt Whitman's Mocking-Bird in 

 Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking. 



Ichthyology in America dates also from these last years of the century. 

 Garden was our only resident ichthyologist until Peck and Mitchill began 

 their work, but Schoepf, the Hessian military surgeon, printed a paper 

 on the Fishes of New York in 1787, and William Bryant, of New Jersey, 

 and Henry Collins Flagg, of South Carolina, made observations upon the 

 electric eel, in addition to those which Williamson, of North Carolina, laid 

 before the Royal Society in 1775. 



Paleontology had its beginning at about the same time in the publication 

 of Jefferson's paper on the Megalonyx or Great Claw in 1797.' 



This early study of a fossil vertebrate was followed twenty years later 

 by the first paper which touched upon invertebrates — that by Say on 

 Fossil Zoology, in the first volume of Silliman's Journal. L,esueur 

 seems to have brought from France some knowledge of the names of 

 fossils, and identified many species for the early American geologists. 



Stratigraphical and physical geology also came in at this time, and will 

 be referred to later. 



The science of mineralogy was brought to America in its infancy. 

 The first course of lectures upon this subject ever given in London was 

 in the winter of 1793-94, by Schmeisser, a pupil of Werner. Doctor 

 David Hosack, then a student of medicine at Edinburgh, was one of his 

 hearers, and inspired by his enthusiasm began at once to form the col- 

 lection of minerals which he brought to America on his return in 1794, 



'The first vertebrate fossils were found in Virginia. Samuel Maverick, of Massa- 

 chusetts, reported to the colony at Boston in 1636 that, at a place on the James 

 River, about 60 miles above its mouth, the colonists had found shells and bones, 

 among these bones that of a whale iS feet below the surface.— Neill's Virginia Caro- 

 lorum, p. 131. 



