1882] "Synopsis of Fishes of North America'' 



soon the men appeared. The flask of spirits I al- 

 lowed them to divide among themselves, but the 

 food was welcome. 



In the course of the same summer President Selim University 

 H. Peabody offered me the professorship of Zoology J/ ft 

 in the University of Illinois, situated at Urbana. 

 Nevertheless, I decided to remain at Bloomington, 

 although the other institution was larger and better 

 equipped than the University of Indiana. But 

 there seemed to me nothing more dreary than a 

 prairie town in the month of August when the roads 

 were lined with mayweed and the streets alternated 

 between flying dust and bottomless mud ; for in those 

 days neither asphalt nor concrete had been thought 

 of for highways. The chair in question was filled by 

 the appointment of my good friend, Dr. Stephen 

 A. Forbes, a very able naturalist, at that time direc- 

 tor of the Zoological Laboratory at Normal, Illinois. 



In September of this year appeared the first ex- A weighty 

 tensive memoir by Jordan and Gilbert, "A Syn- work 

 opsis of the Fishes of North America," this being also 

 the first complete and coherent account of the forms 

 of which it treated. Furthermore, I may frankly 

 say that it played a large part in the history of 

 American Ichthyology, paving the way, however, for 

 its own replacement (in 1896) by the much more 

 extended treatise, "The Fishes of North and Middle 

 America," of Jordan and Evermann. 



3 



In the spring of 1883 I made an interesting ex- 

 cursion to the South in the name of Geology. It 

 was then the custom for Western colleges to grant 



C 245 3 



