264 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



he had begun, with the assurance that no naturalist in America 

 or Europe had the advantages that he possessed. 



On returning home in November, 1832, he found that he 

 had been anticipated in a work he should have done on the 

 Tertiary shells of Alabama, but, having specimens of the 

 species in his cabinet, he prepared a paper, Contributions to 

 Geology, which he presented to the Academy of Natural Sci- 

 ences in August, 1833. It contained two hundred and twenty- 

 one species. His Synopsis of the Family Naiades, published 

 in 1836, and afterward supplemented and expanded, is said to 

 have settled satisfactorily to most conchologists the synonymy 

 of the species. On receiving it, Prince Charles Bonaparte ex- 

 pressed a desire to see all parts of zoology treated in the same 

 manner. In 1849 Dr. Lea presented a paper on the footmarks 

 of the reptile Sauropus pn 'mcevus, found by him in the red shales 

 at Pottsville, Pennsylvania, seventeen hundred feet below the 

 conglomerate, which was of interest on account of the discussion 

 it excited as to the age of the fossil. The footprints were 

 assigned to the old red sandstone, while Prof. Agassiz had 

 declared that he did not believe that any air-breathing animals 

 had existed before the new red sandstone. The discussion 

 was kept up for several years, in the course of which Dr. Lea 

 reiterated and maintained his position that the fossil was what 

 he represented it, and that the formation in which it was found 

 was the one indicated by Rogers as No. XI. Its interest has 

 since been diminished by the discovery and authentication of 

 fossils of air-breathers in still older formations. Another 

 series of papers of peculiar interest was that concerning the 

 fossil saurian of the new red sandstone (Clepsysaurus Pennsyl- 

 vanicus). 



Having retired from business in 1851, Dr. Lea made another 

 visit to Europe in 1852. Many of the incidents of his previous 

 visit were substantially repeated, but in large part with natu- 

 ralists of another generation than those whom he had met be- 

 fore. At Paris he arranged and named the Unionida in the cabi- 

 nets of the eminent conchologists Boivin and Petit. He called 

 upon Dr. Chenu to look for the original specimen of Mulleria 

 of Ferussac, which had never been figured, but simply described 

 as being in Lamarck's collection. " He told Dr. Chenu that 

 he thought it must have been mixed with the Etheria, of which 

 the collection had many specimens. Dr. Chenu declared this 



