4 io POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



cal survey, then arranged, and in progress of arrangement, in the 

 old State Hall on State Street, which building had been assigned 

 for that purpose by the Legislature of 1840. He was appointed to 

 this position by Governor Seward and assumed charge of the col- 

 lections in the latter part of 1842. On the same occasion on which 

 this recommendation was made it was also recommended by the 

 staff that the work in agriculture and paleontology which had 

 been left unfinished should be assigned to Dr. Emmons and Prof. 

 Hall. 



In the spring of 1843 Governor Bouck directed Dr. Emmons to 

 investigate the agricultural resources of the State ; and the pale- 

 ontology was placed under the charge of Prof. Hall, while Dr. 

 Emmons still retained his position as custodian of the collections 

 of the survey until 1845. The five volumes of his report on the 

 Agriculture of New York appeared in 1846, 1849, 1851, and 1854. 

 The first was devoted to a " topographical sketch of the State, 

 climate and temperature, agricultural geology, the Taconic Sys- 

 tem, and the soils of New York " ; the second to analyses of grains 

 and other vegetable products ; the third and fourth, one consist- 

 ing of text, the other of plates, to cultivated fruits ; and the fifth 

 to injurious insects. This fifth volume has been severely criti- 

 cised, but it should be remembered that the writer to whom its 

 preparation was intrusted, not being versed in entomology, could 

 only compile from the best sources at his command, at a time 

 when the science was in its infancy, and comparatively little was 

 known of the insects of the State. The many illustrations, which 

 are well colored in the larger portion of the edition, were mainly 

 drawn from Nature, and in some of the orders, as in Coleoptera 

 and Hemiptera, have a degree of excellence which is rarely sur- 

 passed even at the present day. 



About the time the third volume came from the press he was 

 appointed State Geologist of North Carolina. In his new field he 

 made further important contributions to the advance of Ameri- 

 can geology. In the coal measures of the Deep and Dan Rivers 

 he discovered a grand Triassic flora, and a fauna that included 

 among many ancient vertebrates the Dromatherium sylvestre, the 

 oldest mammal yet found anywhere in the world. His descrip- 

 tion of the new red sandstone flora of North Carolina proved so 

 valuable that twenty years after his death the United States 

 Geological Survey reproduced all the plates and descriptions 

 given by him in the sixth part of his American Geology. Three 

 volumes of North Carolina reports were published by him. One 

 on the Geology of the Midland Counties was issued in 1856; a 

 volume devoted to the Agriculture of the Eastern Counties, with 

 descriptions of the fossils of the marl beds, in 1858; and a second 

 part of his report on the agriculture of the State, " containing a 



